The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  We’ve picked the biggest media influencers for the Annie portraits, some obvious, some not so. There’s Steve Ross and Mike Ovitz and Ted Turner and Diane Sawyer, but also some less expected such as the huge pear-shaped political manipulator Roger Ailes, the trashy biographer Kitty Kelley, photographed by Annie with lookalikes of Liz Taylor, Frank Sinatra, etc.—all the celebrities she’s dished on (a megaproduction that took a week). She’s done W’s John Fairchild at a fashion show, quizzically gazing out between the striding couture legs and stilettos of a runway model, Spielberg asleep on a child’s bed full of toys, Andy Warhol’s headstone in Pittsburgh (RIP media decade). Even persuaded Murdoch to pose. Why not? He may be a shit but he belongs there. I’m giving this a massive forty-page run, Annie’s biggest extravaganza yet. It’s pretty glorious and has taken three months to complete.

  And what for the cover? Seemed only one possibility. We took it to the last minute of deadline but Jane and I were determined to reel it in. Michael Jackson, midmoonwalk on his toes, legs bent, white Errol Flynn shirt billowing behind him. Locks flowing. Such a Thriller, an Annie pièce de résistance.

  Wolcott came in, back from travels, plus Schiff, Miles, and Kornbluth, and we stayed late writing the twenty Hall of Fame two-hundred-word blurbs. Took us all day and late into the evening, with many empty Coke cans, but it turned out well.

  Loved Wolcott’s caption for the MTV girls of Robert Palmer’s rock videos, who looked just like the VF anniversary saxophone band. “It began as radio for the eyeballs and soon became the postmodern trash-masher.”

  All through the session Charles Churchward kept barging into my office with a flushed face, carrying the unwieldy layout board and shouting, “The color has to go out NOW. If we don’t do it now there will be NO RETOUCHING. We need to clean up Kim Basinger’s TEETH. The hair on her top lip has to GO!”

  Nights like these at the mag make it all worthwhile.

  I realized tonight as I hung around, waiting for my car in the crisp fall air, that these are the memories we will cherish, our own convivial version of the Algonquin Round Table. On my way out I picked up a copy of the snappy new mag 7 Days, edited by Adam Moss. It’s so good. It has a big feature on Wolcott as a terror and a tastemaker on a level with Mencken and Mailer. We’re very lucky to have Jim with us and feel good that in VF he’s becoming more and more of a star. The roster of talents takes so much nurturing and protecting and shaping, but I know that task is my most important priority as an editor, bar none.

  Saturday, October 28, 1989

  Bonaventure Resort and Spa, Florida

  Escaped here with G because the Holiday Issue close was such a BRUTE. The Hall of Fame so late to go to press that even Pam McCarthy was on the verge of quitting. We figured out the portfolio took fifteen hundred rolls of film, forty-one thousand miles of air travel, and the photo of Malcolm Forbes posing with twelve working paparazzi took 250 calls to set up. Obeisance to Jane Sarkin. I took her out to lunch.

  Now that Miles is about to leave for England he is in a vile mood. “New York’s loss is London’s loss,” commented Jesse Kornbluth after yet another Miles tantrum. The close was so late I even missed the end-of-the-year sales conference in Nantucket. (Silly sodding place to have it, and reports of the tiny bouncing plane made me very happy I wasn’t there.) Instead I did a video like the Queen’s speech at Christmas to register my cheerleading from the office. Then I had to leave for Naples for the annual ASME magazine conference, where I was doing a panel on celebrity covers.

  I was so beat by the closing of the December issue that I was really lame on the panel. Plus I put on five pounds in two weeks from eating chocolate, thanks to the stress of late-night calls to harangue writers, trying to whip up a journalistic January cover story since all the celebrities that month are duds. The good thing to hang on to is that the sales figures of the mag are so great. That September issue—with the Rolling Stones women, Stroessner, and the Goldie Hawn in cobalt-blue minidress with feathers cover—sold 312,948 copies on the newsstand, which is so prodigious and a record to date. Winning is an addiction.

  When I got back I breakfasted with Dr. Mitch Rosenthal, the founder of Phoenix House drug rehab center, which has been abandoned by Nancy Reagan in their fund-raising drive. So much for her Just Say No campaign. Now that she’s out of office, it’s Just Say Whatever. I am trying to decide whether to step in there and help him raise the money. Want him to show me the PH facility and the work they are doing with kids. He’s almost too good-looking to be credible. What’s the flaw? Is he a Dr. Lydgate figure who succumbs to society or is he the real thing?

  Monday, October 30, 1989

  Received such a tortured letter from Auberon Waugh, who hasn’t written in two years. Three pages on both sides of Literary Review writing paper from his spidery pen. Much of it spent telling me why he has never come to New York to see me because he so hates everything about it and Americans in general. “Where you see zippy, zesty lesbian Jewesses bubbling with new ideas, I see plodding, ill-mannered, bottomlessly earnest boobies.” Jesus. Bron has become so archaic in social attitude, he’s turning into Evelyn.

  He is upset by the VF success that he feels has driven us apart. And reading this letter upset me, too. “When I think of you, which I do quite often,” he writes, “I do not scowl or sneer. It is brilliant of you to have conquered New York and I am terrifically proud. Your hair was extremely poignant when I last saw you because you were wearing it very short, almost en brosse, and when I left you outside that ghastly American hotel we had lunch in I ran my hand through it and felt an unbearable pang which is with me now, although the Duchess of York is expecting her second baby since that event and we have not seen each other since.” A bitter serenade to return to England with asides that told me how bored I would be if I did. It was so raw it made me want to jump on a plane and let him cry in my arms in Bertorelli’s, en brosse hair or not.

  Sunday, November 5, 1989

  Actually, Bron’s letter unsettled me. I am split in two trying to be Mother of the Year as well as an editor! The weekend was hard, with G being very difficult and Harry chained to his computer as bloody always, writing his American Century book. Two workaholics don’t make a rightaholic, particularly when it comes to raising kids. I long to read a book, write, get drunk (if only I could drink!), do anything other than live in this work-dominated monotone we have inflicted on each other. Mum and Dad marvel at how boring our lives are. Nothing like their marriage, where they always had their special hour of a gin and tonic together and their glamorous trips together to film festivals in Venice and Argentina. G never seems to go to bed till ten forty-five, leaving me with no evening. Tonight I got in to a sleeping G and H working and thought maybe, maybe! I could write this diary, play some music, allow myself to dream of another life of wanderlust and hedonism, but then G woke up and I had to spend an hour getting him back to sleep. I felt like throwing myself out the window. I just need three months of freedom, then I swear I will return to the goody-goody track of purposeful achievement and maternal quality time. Fuck.

  Friday, November 10, 1989

  History is made! Was working at home and had CNN on in the background all day, as the world was being turned on its head right before our eyes. Last night, amid the unrest in East Germany, some Communist Party spokesman was giving a completely boring press conference, and a journalist asked him when the new law allowing more freedom of travel from East to West would go into effect, and the spokesman said, more or less, “Immediately, I guess.” And suddenly all of East Berlin was flowing toward the wall. The guards didn’t know what was going on and held them off for three hours, while traffic jammed the street and crowds got angrier and angrier. And then the guards relented, and suddenly the gates were being opened. People flowed through them all night, and all day today, and now it’s night again in Berlin and people are standing on the wall, singing and dancing in front of it, pulling East Germans up to freedom on top of it, the Brandenburg Gate broodi
ng in the background. Young people with hammers and chisels have been pounding at the cement, and there are throngs of deliriously happy people moving through the night, waving, shaking banners, singing, weeping, tearing up their passports, embracing strangers, dancing in conga lines—all while the Stasi, killers to a man, watch placidly, their stony faces masking what must be complete confusion and astonishment. On NBC, Tom Brokaw has been fronting an incredible scene. The West German police are actually trying to protect the wall so that the East German police can dismantle it peacefully, one slab at a time. NBC calls it Freedom Night. It all seems surreal, unbelievable. Brokaw is saying it’s like New Year’s Eve, only better because that holiday hasn’t been celebrated there for so many years. “It’s as if all the energy put toward isolation now is being spent on joy and a new beginning.” Does this mean the end of the Cold War? I feel breathless at the pace all this has happened.

  Monday, November 13, 1989

  The December issue arrived and it’s truly beautiful. The Media Decade Hall of Fame is wonderful—every bit as spectacular and funny as we hoped. The extra forty pages I stole from the page count of the next four issues was worth it, though I know I will be bleating at paying off the page debt next year. The Styron piece is still getting an enormous reaction. We have been flooded with letters from readers sharing their own experiences and telling us they no longer feel ashamed of suffering from depression. Makes us all proud. I will publish them.

  Barry Diller took me to lunch and suggested I make movies as well as edit Vanity Fair. I fail to see how I could be a serious editor and do both. The writers need my attention and when I do other stuff they all get restive. Plus I am sure Si wouldn’t allow it, and shouldn’t, the amount he’s paying. In the boardroom chill of the Four Seasons it briefly seemed possible. Probably because Barry is so persuasive that he makes everything sound easy. We have a great chemistry. He makes me feel very much myself and I make him laugh and vice versa. There is a well-disguised insecurity beneath his tough persona I find endearing. He wants to seem in charge all the time. When we waited too long to order, it was “Julian, are we here for the day!”

  We spent the whole of the first course discussing the latest Ovitz fracas in Hollywood. (Ovitz reportedly threatening to ruin the career of Joe Eszterhas, a screenwriter who wanted to leave CAA. Eszterhas then wrote a letter to Ovitz, recapping all his threats, and then faxed copies to everyone who mattered in Hollywood.) “Is he damaged by this?” ruminated Barry, a keen student of rises and falls. “All I know is that right now a big window has opened at CAA and I’ve told all my people at Fox to dive right into it. Once someone cracks open that little game, the power’s lost.”

  “Is Ovitz upset?” I said.

  “He has to be,” said Barry. “Last week I was in my office at seven thirty in the morning and there was a message that Ovitz had called me at seven. I called him back and he didn’t say anything. I said, ‘Michael, did you call?’ There was a little pause. And he said, ‘Barry, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.’ And I said, ‘Michael, what can I tell you? The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.’”

  Si, meanwhile, tossed out another trusted executive this week—Bob Bernstein, the president of Random House. Twenty-two years of honorable service. And much admired for his campaigns over the years for human rights. Slice. Off with his head. For a week it looked like another Grace Mirabella horror show, except Si then redeemed his gracelessness a bit by putting in the well-regarded Alberto Vitale, the much more commercial strongman CEO of Bantam Doubleday Dell, whom I think he met first at my dinner party for Ed Victor.

  Si does seem, alas, to get a kick out of the brutal unceremoniousness of these topplings. After my print-order meeting for VF he called me in and said, “Well? Well?” eagerly. “What’s everyone saying about Bob?” Perhaps it makes him feel part of the action from which his wealth really excludes him. Or is it the one way he can truly be seen to exercise power, since, as he once said to me, he feels he doesn’t really have any? Each firing seems to lead to another, like a serial killing. The truth is, in the five years I have worked for him his style has gone from Caesar Augustus to Caligula.

  Friday, November 17, 1989

  In the midst of life we are in death. Last week I was having lunch at the Royalton with Howard Kaminsky when a phone call came from the office to say Henry Porter had called from London with the news that David Blundy had been shot covering the rebel uprising in El Salvador for The Sunday Correspondent. His heart stopped twice on the operating table, but there was hope he would make it. The next call said he was dead.

  Blundy! Not you, too! Why is it always the vivid, brave people who seem to be dying before their time! I can see him so clearly in the old Sunday Times days, his chaotic, long-limbed body, his self-parodic, emphatic way of talking, the quivering tip of his ceaseless cigarettes. His teasing bright blue eyes. I think of him sitting on the edge of my Murphy bed in Gloucester Terrace in that tiny studio, pulling on his jeans, smoking, laughing helplessly as I mimicked a North London feminist, whining, “Dave, Dave, I’m a person first and a woman second.” He was a foreign correspondent of the legendary school. When I was younger I didn’t understand how good he was or his obsession with “boring” places like Belfast. It’s only since I have evolved as an editor, handling more and more reported pieces at VF, that I see how his values were the true ones, his obsession to get it right and tell it with clarity, precision, and detail. No amount of style is better than the heart of a story plucked out and dispatched with deadly aim. He died because he went out of his hotel room, as always, to get one last fact before he filed. He was hit by a sniper’s bullet.

  We never talked about the fashionable success of The Sunday Independent, but I bet he found it too writerly. I know he longed for Harry’s kind of newspaper that would expose the truth with a cool eye and a passionate heart. Now he’s on his way home from El Salvador in a box. What possible way to remember him except with a newspaper that honors his reporting values? Harry is so devastated.

  RIP beloved Blundy. That sarcastic laugh. Those sentences. I weep.

  Sunday, November 19, 1989

  What a funny and enjoyable week. I cohosted a dinner with Anna Wintour for Nigel Dempster. Doing this with her made me understand and like her better. She is all business, clip clip clip. She does her side of things very well and efficiently. Progressing things immediately without second thoughts or self-doubt. We had breakfast two days running at the Royalton with Gabé, who had done a very good rough draft of the eighty place-cards to show us. On the last day I suggested to Anna we do a final revision in the lunch hour.

  “I’m going to the hairdresser,” she said.

  “So am I,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “Louis Licari.”

  “So am I!”

  So the final seating meeting took place as the tinfoil was folded into our highlights in the teeming beauty scene at Madison and Sixty-Fifth. It was perfect power-woman time economy. The salon was full of our guest list, all the alpha ladies being frothed and crimped and coiffed as they marked up manuscripts, rearranged dinner lists, or muttered into their little tape recorders for their secretaries to type up. Licari, with his pale face and intense stare, was a focused machine, moving at warp speed among all the tinfoil heads with masterly comb and scissors. Anna was having her bob minked. I was having my streaks bleached. When I left she was furiously scribbling notes for her toast to Nigel, with long, thin legs stretched out for a pedicure. As I raced out of the salon with my new frosted locks I collided with a glut of crew members, trailers, and Winnebagos setting up the next shots for Woody Allen’s new movie.

  The dinner for Nigel at 150 Wooster in Soho, Brian McNally’s new hot spot, was funny for quite other reasons. I love Brian. He always forgets to make money with his restaurants because he loves talking to the customers. He’s such a philosopher and brain box, much more interested in books than gnocchi. The dinner was a very hot ticket. Ten tab
les of media heavies and Brit luminaries. What we hadn’t bargained for was Nigel’s speech, a wild bad-taste salvo about Christina Onassis. Nothing showed more the sensibility gap between London and New York. I am so used to the difference now, I have learned to recalibrate. America is less barbed, more bland, more decorous, completely unused to such asides from Nigel as “Stand up, Luis Basualdo! The only man who didn’t sleep with Christina for her money!” with Luis shouting back, “I’ll sue you, you fool.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw New York mag’s Julie Baumgold’s appalled expression, and sneaking my chair around I saw the ramrod back of Anne Bass, and the dark brows of Diane von Furstenberg, who was probably a friend of Onassis.

  It was like a Charles Addams cartoon, the pockets of laughter in the room coming only from the Brits—Brian McNally, Chris Hitchens, Anthony Haden-Guest, Gully Wells, David Shaffer, Sarah Giles, Anna, John Heilpern, and Miles—against the utter silence and scowls of everybody else. Suddenly there was a snort and the painter Jennifer Bartlett shot out of the restaurant in disgust. After Nigel finished there was a long pause and then a buzz of disbelief. The Brits gathered in a corner together in solidarity against American censoriousness. Brian McNally vented cockney rage: “What the fuck’s Jennifer Bartlett’s problem?” he shouted. “Whatever happened to the fucking avant-garde! Whoever said you ’ad to ’ave good tiste! I never said Good Tiste was on the menu!”

  Nigel himself seemed as impervious as always. Anna shrugged and said maybe Nigel’s humor doesn’t travel.

  I am pissed off today because the Times ran a piece titled “How to Fix the New Yorker” and the lead-off item counseled against “short articles” and “light jazzy material like Vanity Fair.” Maybe they should take a look at Harold Ross’s New Yorker in the thirties. Talk of the Town was telegram snippets. There was visual gaiety on every page. The Times always patronizes the VF achievement. Styron’s twenty thousand words on depression is hardly “light jazzy material.” Nor is Alex Shoumatoff on Chico Mendes. We have so many outstanding writers contributing and wanting to contribute and not enough space to publish them. It blows my mind that the stiffs at the Times still don’t get the concept of mix even now. It reawakens my desire to storm the New Yorker citadel, awaken it from its slumbers, and steal some of the Times’ best writers. Already started by nabbing NYT’s writer Peter Boyer and Leslie Bennetts, ace reporter.