The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Wednesday, July 26, 1989

  On my way to work when Wayne called to say that Steve Rubell had died the night before. Died! I felt so stricken. All my memories of planning VF’s fifth anniversary with him flooded back. The last time I saw him at the now gloriously revamped Royalton I was struck by how tiny and thin he looked. And a year ago, at Reinaldo’s birthday party, I thought his arms looked like breadsticks, ready to snap. I guessed at imminent AIDS but thought somehow he’d be with us for a few more years, like Jonathan.

  But it seems Steve was much sicker than any of us knew. And in his obituary, sadly, as with Jonathan, no one is saying the word “AIDS.” Barry Diller told me that Calvin Klein’s grief for Rubell was exacerbated by the fact that they hadn’t spoken in a year, Calvin wanting to distance himself from Steve’s night-owl allure. And who can blame him. AIDS has made Steve’s kind of carousing a life, not a lifestyle, choice.

  It was a packed and very Jewish funeral a few days later at Riverside Memorial. Unbearable to think of Steve’s speedy little body subdued forever in that oak box. In the hall outside, a pale Ian Schrager, in his yarmulke, moved among the mourners with the same purposeful management as when policing the throngs outside Studio 54. Calvin looked distraught. David Geffen was unrecognizably straight in an Armani suit, Diller in black with white shoes and a cane, implacably tough, his face betraying tragic lines but his stance daring anyone to make him a member of a slowly decimating circle.

  I wish Reinaldo hadn’t worn a yarmulke. With his dark glasses it made him look like a hit man for a Colombian drug cartel. Bianca Jagger, she who had once ridden into Studio 54 astride a white horse in the glory days of 1977, looked for the first time old, while in his distress, Jann Wenner, whose Rolling Stone was so much a part of that era, looked very young. The funeral was Steve’s last party. You could almost imagine him urging us from the coffin to heat up the action. Robert Isabell looked the most traumatized. He was puffy-faced with despair.

  The most moving speaker was Steve’s nephew, who remembered Steve last summer downing Cokes and playing Madonna’s “True Blue” over and over again. It was the funeral of the private Steve, the striving guy from Brooklyn whose father was a postal worker, and who worked his way up from owning steak houses in Queens, the man none of the celebrities ever knew. No boldface names got up. Perhaps Ian just felt this was one happening that didn’t need the publicity value, one where the real Steve could at last admit who he really was.

  Sunday, August 6, 1989

  Quogue

  I’ve lost my voice from screaming over the band at Saul Steinberg’s fiftieth birthday party last night for 250 heavy hitters at the beach. Well. Gayfryd certainly decided to put Quogue on the map. When I heard Robert Isabell was doing the tent like a seventeenth-century living room, I expected extravagance, but nothing like this. Fifty peons had worked for three weeks on what the architect Charles Gwathmey told me was a feat much more difficult than simply building a room. Extending the entire length and breadth of the tennis court, the tent was a baronial seventeenth-century Flemish eating and drinking house to the last detail. You approached from the road on a long, carpeted corridor flanked by a million votive candles in terra cotta pots, a marine corps of valet parkers stationed outside. On the walls of the tent hung replicas of Saul’s old masters in real frames. From the ceiling shone an enormous brass chandelier with a star-emblazoned ball matched by the star in the middle of the black-and-white checkerboard dance floor. Alcoves along the sides featured actors hired for the night posing in tableaux vivants of famous paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer, including a real nude from Rembrandt’s masterpiece Danaë. Tapestry tablecloths, Rembrandt tile place mats, “oak” beamed ceilings, antique china. Out by the pool it was Gatsby time. Identical twins posed as mermaids. It was the Park Avenue answer to Charles de Beistegui’s Venetian costume parties in the fifties and confirmed that Robert Isabell is a kind of genius (or perhaps that Gayfryd is a kind of lunatic).

  Watching her flit and flash about the dance floor, wearing a huge movie-star diamond and sapphire bracelet and a strapless, cobalt-blue gown that skinny-fitted her like steel piping—appropriately, perhaps, since in her past marriage she was the owner of a steel-pipe company—I realized that Gayfryd has the generalship of a social Napoleon. She should be running IBM, not birthday parties. Saul toasted her with “This may be a bit of history. Honey, if this moment were a stock I’d short it.”

  As always a ton of dull Steinberg relatives mixed in with the big players. “I feel icky in this blue suit,” Ron Perelman hissed at Claudia as a white-suited Mort Janklow and a white-panted Steve Ross, the entertainment mogul cruised by. “Honey, you look just great. There are lots of blue suits here,” said his wife. “I said I feel icky,” he hit back. It’s a serious business marrying megabucks like Ron—the obeisance, the grooming, the tireless upkeep of the spouse’s ego. Watch the Texan commerce secretary’s wife, Georgette Mosbacher, and Gayfryd fall on their husbands with compliments after they’ve made their toasts and you see the twenty-four-hour vigilance required, the unflagging stroking.

  I was seated between the decorator Mark Hampton and Saul’s brother, Bob, a less charismatic version of himself. “What happens to this tent tomorrow?” I asked.

  “The A-list party,” he replied.

  Gayfryd seated herself between Robert Mosbacher, in recognition no doubt of the social rise of Georgette in DC, and J. Carter Burden, plus the Henry Kravises. This is the fourth time, I note, that she has chosen handsome, WASPy Carter to sit next to … He is certainly the antithesis of Saul.

  “My brother is brilliant, he’s innovative. He’s full of shit,” said Bob Steinberg as first Saul, then Gayfryd, then Laura Tisch, then Vartan Gregorian, then Robert Mosbacher made their elaborate toasts to the munificence of Saul.

  In my ear the decorator Mark Hampton said, “Most extravagance is obnoxious because it’s devoid of humor, but this is really very amusing!” Since Gayfryd herself is unsusceptible to humor, the touches of whimsy must be Robert Isabell’s knowing eye.

  “Well!” said Gayfryd when she got up to make the toast, not a glint of sweat on her shiny shoulders. “What do you all think?”

  This was a glimpse of the unfinished learning curve—seeking guest feedback in the moment from the women who compete with her—and I couldn’t help liking her the more for it. Saul’s daughter Laura Tisch’s speech thanked her for uniting the children of Saul’s three marriages. The muscles in Gayfryd’s back rippled almost imperceptibly in satisfaction. Smart trophy wives don’t fight with the kids. They unite, the better to forestall later arguments about the will. As Mort Janklow put it, as we tried an aerobic fox-trot to a series of sixties numbers that were clearly Saul’s golden hits, “Gayfryd understands the big picture.”

  Does she? Or is it tempting fate to do something this extravagant now? I suspect the ghost of Michael Milken and the fall of Drexel may have been on the minds of many guests as they quaffed the vintage vino. It certainly was on mine. “Milken is the Dr. Strangelove of Wall Street,” Hampton said. “Why did we strive to admire him so? Shudder. Shudder. Shudder.”

  But decorators such as Mark and everyone in that tent were happy to feast at the boom trough.

  Wednesday, August 9, 1989

  I’m pregnant!

  Two weeks late, with a bout of laryngitis, I told the doctor before he gave me antibiotics that perhaps we should do the test. Subliminally, I suppose, the feeling had been growing, the feeling of bloatedness and breast tinglings. I called Harry with the news and he sounded as stunned about it as I feel. But I am so happy, grateful to God for blessing me again just when I had started to long for it. Have been feeling a pang every time I see G alone at the window. Now he’ll get a brother or sister and I am walking on air! It’s been hard to concentrate with my expanding secret.

  The Styron piece about his depression is in, and it’s magnificent. He talks about how his lifelong battle with the disease became so agonizing that suicide be
came seductive. Even though there has been so much written on depression, no one with his kind of profile has written so candidly about what it’s like to live with the real pain and darkness of something, light-years away from just “the blues.” We are running the piece at twenty thousand words with a powerful headline I stole from Milton in Paradise Lost:

  No light, but rather darkness visible

  Served only to discover sights of woe,

  Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

  And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

  That comes to all.

  Darkness visible. That seems to describe Styron’s pain so well. Strange how poetry hangs around in the mind so long.

  Thursday, August 10, 1989

  Was invited out by Aline, Countess of Romanones, who has finished her next memoir, The Spy Went Dancing, another romanticized account of her life in the OSS. Since Luis died she has dropped twenty years, with an incredible face-lift that has given her back the oval-shaped face of her youth, set off by a cracking-great sapphire and diamond necklace. A cobalt-blue (clearly this season’s color) culotte suit clung to her iron-pumped form.

  The evening was what Nancy Mitford used to call “dinner for the dug-ups,” an uneasy mix of return social matches with many hidden mines—Harold Brodkey, whose last novel Jim Wolcott brilliantly took apart in VF last year; Lynn Nesbit, whom Brodkey had just acrimoniously left for Andrew Wylie, the literary agent stealing everyone’s clients; Marife Hernandez, the Puerto Rican socialite on the board of every museum, whom Michael Shnayerson assassinated in VF three Christmas issues ago; John Shad, the new head of Drexel who pretended not to have read Marie Brenner’s talked-about-everywhere piece on Milken; and, thank God, Reinaldo to oil the wheels. Far from harboring grudges, Brodkey spent the whole evening romancing me about VF. “The voice of Anglo-Saxon intelligence,” he gushed. “You are the only editor not afraid of it. No magazine has ever had this influence before.”

  “What about Harold Hayes’s Esquire?” I said suspiciously.

  “It was never influential,” said Brodkey, which is so untrue. And what about Felker and Wenner? What about William Shawn, for whom he wrote at The New Yorker for so many years? Brodkey is so full of shit, but the question is, why?

  Friday, August 18, 1989

  What a terrible week. I miscarried. On Monday night I started to have cramps and bleed. All through Tuesday the bleeding continued. I went for a blood test and an ultrasound. Looking at the screen, the technician said, “This doesn’t look right at all.” Dr. Thornton told me on Wednesday that the blood test figures were flat and she would end the pregnancy. Yesterday I went into New York Presbyterian for a D&C and woke up in the ghostly cold recovery room feeling as if I had awoken in a mortuary, which in a way I had. How do some women cavalierly have abortions? I feel so distressed and knocked over. Harry is devastated and keeps saying he didn’t protect me enough, which isn’t true.

  I can’t believe this has happened. Except to view it as divine retribution for the sin of thinking I am in control. I thought I had it taped—the new Condé Nast money, looking after the family, the new phase of job security, and then I would “allow” myself a baby. Not happening. I should not imagine I can play God in this way.

  It has left me feeling strangely dead and precarious. Now I have to add miscarriage as well as premature birth to my anxieties about a second pregnancy. I feel terribly bereft.

  Saturday, August 26, 1989

  Gray fingers of anxiety. Worried about G. He has been so difficult, going into what I think of as his Rain Man mode, getting stuck on one activity, in this case building “dark tunnels” (what awful Freudian terror does this signify?) and refusing to be deflected. Took him to an optometrist at the suggestion of his UN preschool, where they say he has difficulty with visual tasks. Doc said his cognitive functioning is erratic, able to duplicate a block design—a square with a triangle on top—but unable to do it diagonally. He has difficulty keeping balance and manipulating a pencil. Said his gross, fine, and graph motor function need further training, so we will step up the physical therapy. He is much calmer in Quogue. I know we should spirit him away out of the stress of New York City.

  The fax machine keeps remorselessly chugging and spitting out bits of office data. I feel trapped. It’s funny how our new freedom from money concerns is quickly replaced by other anxieties. Now all I think about is the health of family and friends. I suppose I am crazy to want another child, but I feel such a chasm where the second one should be.

  Tuesday, September 26, 1989

  I hardly know how to describe this last month. It’s been a tunnel of blood, the crazy collision of planets. Dad went to London for a bone-cancer scan and was told it was positive until a second trip three weeks later registered it was negative and he was reprieved. Then, weirdly, uncannily, on his way back from his pacemaker checkup, he had a stroke! For three days when his condition didn’t stabilize, it really looked as if he might die. I found myself starting to lose control. As I left on the plane to London, G developed a raging fever that I learned when I landed had turned out to be pneumonia. Mum has had an agonizing time shuttling between hotels and Chris and Diana’s basement. I felt my prime role was to keep her spirits up. Dad was so happy to see me, though he looked so pale and reduced in the hospital bed. Hard to see him like this instead of how I always think of him, so big and ebullient with his huge laugh.

  Miraculously he quickly plateaued and has suffered only slight damage to his left leg and arm, which are already improving with physical therapy. The voice therapist came this morning to work on his slightly slurry speech. “Now, Mr. Brown. Let’s have a little bit of Gilbert and Sullivan, shall we?”

  “I am the very model of … a model—major general,” my dear dad said heavily, and I thought of his vaudeville mother, who sang Gilbert and Sullivan to him in the costume hamper, where he slept as she went onstage, and the Kipling man he always wanted to be. It seemed so poignantly right for the epitaph on his life. He was the very model till his health and the career he loved gave out. I told the nurses, to show them he wasn’t always like this, about his great producing days, his derring-do war years filming the action in the Western Desert for the Air Ministry and stealing away the Krupp archives in Essen before the Allies got there, how he was married first to Maureen O’Hara, eloping with her when she was only seventeen. They were fascinated by all this dashing stuff and I could see that growing in their estimation made him feel better. I cried a lot of tears on the plane home.

  The best thing in all this was being able to spend time alone with Mum for the first time in so long. After visiting Dad we would adjourn to a café in St. John’s Wood and gorge on croissants. She is still so funny and wonderful, telling me about their comical expat community in Spain and their new social life full of retired tycoons with Swedish models and “the adorable train robbers who live up the hill.” She and Dad haven’t stopped giving their colorful parties. She knows they can’t continue to live in Spain much longer. She will find that crushing.

  Saturday, September 30, 1989

  All this distraction hasn’t helped the mag. For the important November issue we had a great Baryshnikov cover story by Stephen Schiff only to find again (is there an office mole?) that Life has one, too. Then, just as I was trying to figure out how to make ours different, we find Misha has now quit the American Ballet Theatre after a huge row and said fuck you to the fiftieth anniversary gala, which VF is, by the way, cosponsoring, and which is a huge ballet-world story not captured in Schiff’s piece. Six hours to go before press so I raced into the office to strip in new copy. Labored with Sharon and Stephen on inserts that covered the political row at ABT and choose different pics with Charles and wrote new captions and blurbs that sounded like we had the red-hot dope we didn’t. Damn damn damnsky all aroundsky.

  One of my fave quotes from Misha defending himself for doing Amex ads and his own perfume lines is, “What is life if you can’t be cheap and vulgar
sometimes? It makes you better appreciate the good things. Sometimes I do cheap things and why not? I don’t give a shit.” Misha understands high-low entirely. I should be as defiant as he when I get the dreary old rap about what VF should and shouldn’t do (currently being killed for running the pics of the “vulgar” Steinberg party). As a woman, however, I could never get away with a quote like that.

  In the middle of all this a blast from the past showed up, Stephen Glover, my old Oxford flame, who’s launching with others a new English daily paper called, damn it, The Independent. So jealous! He always had such a dreamy, poetic air when we were students, this dynamism surprised me.

  Friday, October 6, 1989

  Have decided to give this year’s Hall of Fame a theme. The Media Decade. There have been twenty-five hundred new magazines in the eighties. Within the media Spy is making the most impact because the media is what it’s all about. It flatters media people by bothering to take them down. It treats ink-stained wretches like movie stars or politicians or business moguls, important enough to be mercilessly ridiculed. It’s not as funny as Private Eye in its heyday, but its relentless branding of foibles, e.g., Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” are pretty inspired.

  The explosion of media in the last ten years is not just about volume. Media is invading media. With the Time Warner merger we’ve got Batman scaling the walls of Time Inc. Art romping with commerce—Joan Didion posing for a Gap ad, CEOs becoming performers and performers becoming CEOs. It’s not enough anymore to be Oprah Winfrey. You have to be Oprah Winfrey, president of Harpo Productions and Harpo Studios.

  The image makers are now as important as the stars themselves, and certainly more interesting. Maybe because their power is our need. The more fragmented we become as a culture, the more the media holds us together. Americans have less and less in common as a people, but we all watch the same TV shows and the same movies.