The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  It was incredible to be sitting around a table again with Wolcott, Schiff, and Jesse Kornbluth writing the captions for this year’s Hall of Fame. It’s the first time Miles wasn’t here to berate us. Wolcott says the least until the rhythms trouble him into speaking out, and then he offers something perfect. But it’s less good than the Media Decade last year. Serious heroes are less compliant with outrageous Annie pictures. And yet this year we have two major real ones—Nelson Mandela and Václav Havel, leader of the Velvet Revolution. We threw in some baddies for contrast, Andrew Dice Clay and John Gotti. Jim had the brain wave of writing the Clay caption in his own voice. “So I pissed off a few fruits and scags. Is that any reason to crucify me?”

  Tuesday, October 16, 1990

  Waiting for baby D-day! My Caesarian is scheduled for October twenty-second. Dr. Thornton thinks that with the prematurity of G and the miscarriage, I should not risk natural birth. Oddly, I have never felt more energized and focused, ballooning around the office and getting work cleared so I can soon disappear. Roseanne will be much reviled, but I think it is a great conversation starter and I love adding comedy and comedians to shake up movie-star blandery. Jim Wolcott came in again to help with cover lines. (“Roseanne in Fat City”?) T. D. Allman turned in an excellent, deeply reported piece on Helmut Kohl and German reunification. I couldn’t help laughing when I thought of how Kohl would feel when the issue arrived with Roseanne cavorting half-naked. I know it will crush Tim Allman, who was so happy to be able to send Kohl the Gorby cover to reassure him we are serious, and that did give me pause. When he saw it, he said grimly, “One day I hope we will solve our cover problems.” “You never know,” said Wolcott. “Roseanne probably looks just like Frau Kohl.”

  We have some staff swings and roundabouts, which will actually energize the mag. Sharon is going. When I called her in to talk about staff complaints again she called me a cunt, which was a bit excessive, even for her. Seems to want to work on projects with Sontag. Still, I will miss her dogged ability to restructure a “vomit draft” piece. Then in the usual way one exit causes another, over breakfast photo director, Elisabeth Biondi, who has been so stellar for so long, said she had accepted a job to go back to Germany and work at Stern. I told her she would hate boring Hamburg. No one can leave NYC once they have lived here for long. She knows it’s true but wants a life.

  So we have lost Sharon and Biondi but gained Mike Caruso as an editor, and I hired as a new promotions director Hamilton South, lured away from Barney’s. He has such style and charm, he can be the missing link between ad clients and editorial we so much need. Since neither Si nor Doug understand nor value the need for social skills with luxury clients, I managed to slip Hamilton in on the editorial budget. Only anxiety before the baby is 60 Minutes, which airs this Sunday, on baby eve.

  G is finally getting excited about the baby and decided to name her tonight. We had been thinking Daisy, but G was adamant. “Let’s call her Isabel,” he said. It felt unfamiliar until I said it aloud. Isabel Evans. I love the two together. And suddenly felt I knew who she is, serious and calm and clever and sweet.

  Tuesday, October 23, 1990

  Lying in my New York hospital bed feeling wonderfully quiet and serene. My darling little baby Isabel Harriet has just been wheeled back to the nursery. She is so tiny, with bright alert blue eyes and a lovely big mouth. The amazing thing is there is something about the shape of her beautiful brow that is just like my mother, and she is dark, too, like Mum, her peach-fuzz hair dark brown.

  She was born yesterday morning. As the nurses stuck me up with needles and an anesthesiologist shot me up with the epidural, I felt the huge weight of being a woman. Giving birth is something only we can do and it is full of pain and fear. Next door a woman in labor moaned and wailed with cries from the Middle Ages while I held Harry’s hand tight and quailed in my cubicle over the imminence of the knife. Dr. Thornton was so reassuring, though. Gone was the power woman in pink heels and fuchsia dress. Now she was all doctorly seriousness in her blue paper cap. At eight thirty a.m., when my waist had begun to freeze, they wheeled me into the OR, placed a curtain between me and my bottom half, and began to work away at me. Harry was squeezing my hand like mad and was more agitated than I was. After about six minutes I felt a strange pressure on my tummy. “Her head is coming out!” cried Thornton. “Her shoulders!” It was like a painting emerging from invisible ink. Harry was weeping and shouting, “The darling! The darling!” and suddenly my stomach felt empty and I heard a raspy little cry. When the nurse parted the curtain, I saw her, my tiny, mottled, dark-haired little sweetheart baby girl, Isabel! They brought her up to my face so I could kiss her and look into the brightest, beadiest little pair of blue eyes.

  “She’s so alert!” everyone chorused, and they took her off to swaddle and clean her, then laid her gently on my breast. She grasped the nipple firmly and eagerly in her questing mouth, and I felt the purest love for my daughter, who is mine forever, the deepest love of my deepest self.

  Lying here cut off from the world is wonderful peace from my jagged life beyond. Harry spent the weekend before Operation Isabel negotiating with Vitale down to the wire, when Alberto suddenly got cold feet about removing Joni Evans as president of Random House entirely. In the end it was solved graciously with her taking her own imprint instead. It was bedlam trying to get the space ready for the baby and baby nurse, with the half-completed apartment addition in builder’s chaos and G agitated by all the turbulence, racing around the dining room like a train, frantically calling up Little Mermaid characters on the phone. Where does he get it from? Then as the mad weekend drew to a close we all sat around the TV for 60 Minutes.

  It was fabulous. They really showed the mix of journalism and celebrity in the mag, made it seem alive and important, and it’s going to be an incredible boost to VF sales. A thrilling way to put one phase of my life to bed and drive in serenity to the hospital to give birth the next morning. The great upside of a Caesarean is that you can shoot up with Demerol and float out to sea. Isabel spent most of yesterday snuggling at my breast so peacefully. Now I can stare at her for hours and see the full sweetness of her big mouth and smooth, round cheeks. My new little stranger for whom I feel such stirrings of crazy love. G came to visit and suddenly seemed so huge and bouncy. I had ensured there would be a gift at home for him, a set of tiny Little Mermaids, and he brought Ariel to see me and kissed her and me with equal gusto. He’s such an affectionate soul, I think he surely must love Isabel. My dear little family! I feel now the circle is complete and all the real things in life can surround me in peace. What an amazing few days. But all pales beside the gorgeous, sweet-smelling bundle nestling beside me.

  Friday, November 2, 1990

  After a quiet weekend at home with the new arrival, all hell let loose when G suddenly realized Isabel is not going back. His sweet interest was replaced with vengeful imprecations. “Let’s flush her down the toilet!” Then he was back to sweet again, waving his magic wand over her bassinet and saying, “You must be a brave, truthful, and true baby sister!” Whenever I pick her up for a feed, he tries to grab me away for a cuddle. I suppose such jealousy is normal, but it’s been a roller coaster. Meanwhile, Isabel has been developing her own real face—strong nose, bright, curious eyes, kissable pink mouth. I feel she will be more down-to-earth than Georgie. “Come on, Mummy, let’s get real,” I can hear her say as G drifts off into the ether with poetry and Edgar Allan Poe stories. It’s heavenly to be around my home, however chaotic, instead of racing out with a pile of manuscripts spilling out of my bag. Heavenly to take my own children to the pediatrician instead of calling the doctor from the office for an update. Was just savoring my domesticity when news of Harry’s new job as president and publisher of Random House broke. “Too much cultural power centered on one living room,” Leon Wieseltier put it darkly when he called me to “congratulate.” The New York Times went crazy, putting the story on page one, with a two-column turn to the business se
ction, with a three-column “golden couple” sidebar on the new baby, etc. Feel ominous when I read such hyperbole and can only imagine Nora Ephron’s fangs out.

  What is great, though, is how much pleasure there is for Harry around town, where he is so popular. So much backbiting about my having “outstripped” him, and this really rights that gallingly sexist perception, unimaginable the other way around. A delicious irony is that two weeks ago Random House bought Rupert Murdoch’s autobiography, so Harry is now his publisher. All the papers made note of that.

  Friday, November 30, 1990

  Caroline Graham calls to say I have to apologize to the CAA agent Ron Meyer, who is livid about the remarks I made on 60 Minutes about his most important client and friend, Sly Stallone, whose girlfriend I unhappily called a “bimbo” on camera. (Yup, of course they used it. I should have guessed and warned him, but it slipped my mind while giving birth.) Apparently he was on his car phone and kept cutting in and out so that all Caroline could get was “How could Tina stab … who does Tina think she … mired me in shit by…” Finally Caroline said, “Look. I am sure Tina didn’t realize what she was doing to Sly,” and Meyer bawled, “Don’t bullshit me! Tina Brown went to Oxford! She always knows what she’s doing!”

  Being here with my snoozy, snuffly little baby with the hammering and banging of the apartment extension is unbelievable. Why did we do this extension? The place suddenly feels too big. I feel I need roller skates like Princess Di to elude the cacophony of builders, and nannies, and faxes and phone calls and packages from the office, interrupted by Isabel’s hunger pangs or Georgie climbing onto my bed to demand “a big, fat kiss.” Tonight he told me, “Your cheeks smell of blueberry muffins.” It’s been lovely for G having my parents around, but hellish for me because of their oxygen-eating neediness. I feel an emotional wreck, not ready at all to face the office as my slim maternity leave is whittled away. I am worried that G will always be so demanding, it will squeeze out Isabel, my dear pink worm, and she will get the short end of it.

  With his usual exquisite timing, Si suddenly fired Doug Johnston and appointed Ron Galotti as VF publisher. Ron is a fantastic choice, as I saw how brilliantly he launched Traveler for Harry. But couldn’t Si have waited for me to get back? I felt bad for Doug but did warn him that he had less time than he thought. Ron is very swaggery, a creative business guy. A player. Compared to Doug’s preppy affability, Ron’s dialogue is right out of Goodfellas, which is pretty entertaining. He absolutely despises Bernie Leser, unfortunately, which won’t help corporate relations. We met to get to know each other better at the Small Café, a block from me, and I grilled him on what he would do for VF. His slicked-back hair shone with “product” and his necktie was man-of-the-world dapper. He immediately launched into a Bernie Leser offense.

  “That guy’s so full of it, it’s incredible,” he told me. “The other day we were standing outside Condé Nast and he was giving me some story about how his vacation in Australia was no vacation because of all the clients he saw, and I started to stare at my feet. Bernie says, ‘Why are you looking down, Ron,’ and I say, ‘Because I am up to my knees in bullshit, Bernie, and it just keeps raining down.’”

  Bernie keeps trying to get between him and Si to try to wield control over Condé’s most successful, and therefore threatening, publisher. “I say, look, Bernie. When the Man calls down from the fourteenth floor, am I going to hang up on him? Put him on hold and check it out with you? Give me a break here. Stop haunting my house. It’s beyond belief, Tina. It’s beyond belief.” If this dialogue keeps up, I will for sure be happy.

  Saturday, December 1, 1990

  Gail Sheehy came over to talk about a new piece she wants to write about menopause. Two women at opposite ends of the fertility spectrum confronting each other over a cup of tea.

  It was nice to talk stories after six weeks of cotton head. We sat in the living room while I nursed Izzy and she laid the piece out. I love the idea of tackling menopause. Women always feel they have to hide it, or treat it like some secret disease instead of part of a natural cycle. And then when we’re through it, we’re made to feel discarded and reduced. Gail said, on the contrary, she wants to write about the incredible “postmenopausal rush” when women are at their most confident and productive. Yippee. I can’t wait. Must be so liberating to be done with the need to be attractive and focus instead on fulfillment and power. I can’t wait to be a grand old trout making influential decisions. I told Gail absolutely, do it. Let’s call it “The Secret Passage,” referencing back to her old bestseller, Passages, and amplifying the taboo angle. It’s good to turn Gail back to personal life after a long winning streak on politics. Writers need constant refreshment and change of direction. Nothing worse than being stuck on a “beat.”

  Hollywood people are unbelievable. Jeffrey Katzenberg called me up a week ago and asked if I would do a screening for his new movie Green Card with Gerard Depardieu. I told him I just had a baby and was on leave. He totally ignored me and told me I must do this for him because I owed him. (For what?) It’s a great movie, he insisted, that’s what friends are for, etc. I should have told him to take a hike, then of course succumbed. But I really didn’t feel ready for it, like a deep-sea diver as I swam around the faces I didn’t want to see, with baby-head making me forgetful and vague. I had forgotten how terrifyingly tough NYC is, what an hourly battering it is to stay on top. I was in such a sensitive mood that I felt I had gone out stark naked.

  It was the first time I have faced people since I put Roseanne Barr on the mag’s cover, which has, as expected, been universally reviled. Nick Dunne said he has been aggressed about it everywhere he’s been, with “Trust me, she’s gone too far this time” as the most common response. Still, they are all still reading it. And our Tatler motto of “the magazine that bites the hand that reads you” is still my mantra.

  Sunday, December 2, 1990

  Today I had an unsettling visit from Georgie’s physical therapist at the hospital, who told me, to my sadness, she does not think G can go to a mainstream school. And as she itemized all the preschool things he has trouble with—his lack of participation, she says, is due to neurological processing problems—I realize the way he perseverates, the way he can’t do puzzles or stick things on paper or cut out and make things like other children, is due to delays from the prematurity she now painfully points out. It breaks my heart to have it confirmed but I only love him all the more, determined to get him all the support he needs to overcome it. He’s so brilliant with words and so original, I know he will find his own path. He loves preschool so much, arriving with the other kids and bustling in, but I do see more and more the difference between him and them. If only he had come to full term. Was it my fault for working too hard and long? I worry so much about what the cruel world has in store when he has so many challenges. I told Harry tonight and he was deeply upset. We sat on the sofa together and cried. We have been to so many doctors and none of them have come up with a label to hang on to. It only makes us both more deeply connected to him. He surprises us all the time with new things he can do. My task is now to find a school that will really help him. I am even more glad to have a second child, who, when she grows up, will always be there for G.

  We resolved to make this the best, the happiest Christmas he has ever had.

  1991

  NATURAL BORN WOMAN

  Monday, January 7, 1991

  New York is so cold after our Florida idyll with G and Izzy. It was bliss pulling Iz around the pool in her rubber ring at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, her tiny feet splashing, while Harry took G off on speedboat rides.

  People may think I want to go off and run the world, but my stubborn dream is being the mistress of an Oxford college, living in my own personal Garsington Manor, and summering in Tuscany with my teetering pile of books on British history. Yet whenever I go to an expat Oxford alum event I am reminded of how genially hilarious Oxford is, pure Alan Bennett. The vice-chancellor of Oxford, Si
r Richard Southwood, showed up in town for a huge fund-raising drive, but it’s all done in the amateurish, apologetic way of the English that is so hopelessly ineffectual in New York, capital of capital. Southwood’s résumé for a start: he’s a zoology professor specializing in exotic beetles. As he started to speak I realized how long it was since I’d heard anyone say “I hasten to assure you” or refer to “donkey’s years.”

  “Oxford!” Southwood proclaimed to the listening circle of putative American donors. “Home of such important international influences … Winnie-the-Pooh … Alice in Wonderland!” (This sly whimsy was lost on the group, who looked puzzled and shifted in their seats.) “Scholarship today is not [raising a finger] what you might think! A matter of a notebook and a pencil. Heavens, no! It requires computers! Highly complex technical aids to further our researches. These are expensive! Let me tell you a little story! A friend of mine is an ancient historian at Magdalen. For the last five years he has been trying to ascertain the precise date of the opening of the silk route and has been stumped. Now, however, there exists an intricate piece of technology that can take the remnant of silk and tell us exactly when it was produced! But the technology is expensive and that, my friends, is why I’m here.”

  Watching the unimpressed faces at the four tables, I realized how American I have become. Coaching him, I would have said, “Look, Dick, that résumé won’t fly in New York. How about Soviet studies? They always love that.” “I’m a zoologist!” he would protest, but, sadly, silk routes, beetles, and “hastens to assure us” are not going to raise Oxford a dime. Everyone shuffled off into the elevator afterward, looking puzzled and somewhat drunk.