The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Tuesday, May 7, 1991

  In flight, Vancouver to New York

  Delivery of speech was a B but the content must have scored, as there were a bunch of reporters afterward asking for copies. Last night Sue and Donald gave a dinner for all the newspaper big shots. Frank Bennack was there with his wife, Luella. I felt a pang because I do really like him and he was very nice with no hint of resentment. I felt great affection, though, for my own dear Newhouses. For a family of gerbils they have a dash of style. It was very cool of them to lay on the plane.

  As I socked it to the audience about how boring their newspapers are, it occurred to me that if I was offered one to edit, I would certainly accept. I still find newspapers way sexier than magazines. I am bored with the world of Ralph Lauren and Polo. My dream would be to do it with Harry, but he’s now ensconced in the even slower world of books. Steve Newhouse, Donald’s son who runs the New Jersey paper, was very thrilled and sparkly-eyed about my speech. Perhaps he will be the one who shakes it all up.

  Friday, May 17, 1991

  The lead of the July issue collapsed. I lost confidence for the fourteenth time in Gail Sheehy’s Saddam Hussein piece. She hasn’t nailed it this time, it needs more deep Middle East knowledge. It’s been a curse. Or as Gail would write, a black cloud, a brooding threat, a dark imprecation. Pam McCarthy has been locked in the office with Gail half the week, trying to nail down her sourcing, at one point emitting the desperate cry “But Gail, how do you know what Saddam’s mother was thinking?”

  Being stuck in this position showed the weakness in our system at the moment. I need a greater variety in lead writers to tackle these pieces or I ask too much of the great ones I already have. And we have to have backups for when things flame out. I have been doing too many extracurricular things and it’s making the staff irritable. It was thus a flak-filled day, arguing on the phone with Gail, Elise O’Shaughnessy, who was editing the piece, and Pam for denying us more deadline time, and forcing the fact-checking department to go over it again, while at the same time having to get the backup piece on the Agnelli empire, which is the only available (but unremarkable) substitute ready for publication in case we can’t make it work. At one comical moment I had a raging Gail Sheehy on one line, Norman Mailer on another, trying to talk more about my involvement with the Actors Studio gala, and Si wanting to read over the phone to me the speech he’s written for the FIT tribute to Condé Nast.

  Saturday, May 18, 1991

  Gave a book publishing dinner for Clark Clifford’s memoir, cowritten with Dick Holbrooke, that Harry is publishing at Random House. Twenty years from now I will look back on it with fascination.

  The whole atmosphere of the dinner was glowing with dated power. Here was Clifford, in his eighties—one of the most distinguished figures in American politics, patrician wise man to Presidents Truman, John F. Kennedy, LBJ, and Jimmy Carter, publishing a book that should be his legacy victory lap, and instead he’s in the middle of the BCCI banking scandal, facing charges of fraud, conspiracy, and taking bribes, a furore that has broken over his head at the same time as the pub date of this long-awaited book. He claims he was “duped” by his partners over BCCI, but the reality was probably a rare error of judgment fueled by latent character weakness, a love of power and reward that has increased as he loses relevance and believes his own legend.

  An extraordinary assembly of mostly Camelot survivors convened to celebrate this ancient, elegant politico who’s right out of one of Gore Vidal’s novels. (“Will there be re-marks?” he inquired as we sat down to eat.) And his own “re-marks” were some of the best I have heard, a reenactment of a party thrown by a “dry” senator twenty years ago at which “those who usually had one drink before they got there had four, those who usually had six had eight,” the result being that all the senator’s guests arrived half-drunk, and Clifford proceeded to act out each of the half-drunk senators’ toasts—with full body-movement and speech content—to such a hilarious degree that the entire room was howling. It’s probably a routine he’s done many times but it was astounding! A good thing the DA wasn’t here, given his BCCI defense is that he can’t remember.

  The arrangement of this dinner had given me much anxiety. Holbrooke, in his incorrigibly pushy way, kept inviting extra people and our dining room only seats sixteen for a seated dinner of two tables of eight, or at most thirty if we do buffet and five tables of six. This clearly was not a buffet crowd. Octogenarian Camelotters and the most famous first lady in history have to be properly respected. But as guest after guest accepted, it seemed a buffet for thirty would be unavoidable (though I still place-carded it). Was particularly worried about Jackie Onassis, who has never been to our house. I knew after the VF cover story “Jackie, Yo!” she would ruminate long and hard about accepting this, and would only do so for Clifford. Our piece, although very “pro” her, was pretty vulgar and intrusive. There is no doubt she hated it. And only two issues ago we ran the juicy Marilyn Monroe extract from the Peter Lawford bio, which had pull-quotes about JFK having sex with Marilyn.

  How would she react to me after the gracious introductions? I would find out in a wonderful, subtle put-down she aimed at me, unforgettable in its deft and understated malice.

  In person Jackie has an enormous head and a fragile presence. At dinner she and I sat close to each other because we were on either side of Clifford. The rest of the table was the historian Arthur Schlesinger, whom I sat beside her for the comfort of an old friend in a strange house, Victoria Newhouse, Ambassador Philip Habib, and the fabled speech writer Ted Sorensen. Watching Jackie close up was mesmerizing. Her face is always slightly out of whack with her expression, as if they are two separate entities at work. She has perfected a fascinated stare. Sitting finishing-school upright in a fuchsia Carolina Herrera jacket over a dark sheath, she looks into your face, not your eyes, and not mine, I hasten to say. In fact, “crazed” is what I decided about Jackie by the end of the evening. I felt if you cleared the room and left her alone, she’d be in front of a mirror, screaming. Her responses are so out of kilter. After thirteen minutes of a rapt stare, she suddenly claps her hands and cries in that breathy little voice, “Oh, Clark! You sly fox, you! The way you, the way you … dispatched Eisenhower! In that sly, slinky, oh, Cliffordy way! All the, all the, revisionism about Eisenhower! Oh, Clark, I don’t know about it! You know how we all … when we leave office … we’re dumped on. And then we, then we come back and it’s all written over again! Oh, Clark! What you wrote was so, so perfect!”

  These disjointed outbursts came like a rush of animation from a puppet. It’s as if somebody jerks the strings, the body lurches to life, then she gradually sinks back into starey-eyed repose. But on to the put-down. Halfway through dinner, Arthur Schlesinger began to praise our Mrs. Thatcher profile by Maureen Orth. He was telling Habib he should read it, and Clifford, who amazed me by being a solid VF reader from all his references, agreed that it was first-rate. Jackie listened to all this, then suddenly turned to Clifford and said, “Oh, Clark! There’s a wonderful piece in this week’s New Republic you must, must read!” I knew instantly what she was referring to; the savaging of Gail Sheehy’s Gorbachev book by Tatyana Tolstaya, ridiculing all the alleged inaccuracies. Everyone knows that Sheehy’s Gorbachev book derives from her hit cover story in Vanity Fair. She went on, “Clark, Clark, I will send you this piece because you’ll die laughing. It’s about this, this naive American girl journalist, who’s oh so culturally ignorant about the Soviet Union that she applies her, her limited, silly Western views and logic to all the mysteries of the modern Soviet state!” As soon as I saw her game I broke away into a conversation with Habib while listening to her with one ear and catching her delicate sideways look to me across the salmon puff pastry, a look that registered she knew I knew she was shafting me and why. It was masterful.

  Still the evening was a magical one, the casualness of it, the small tables and the careful seating worked so well. I shall never forget the vignet
te of Clifford sprawled on our big green round club chair after dinner with his long, spindly legs extended and Jackie kneeling at his feet, looking up at him. A nice surprise was her longtime escort Maurice Tempelsman, whom I had always filed as plodding and dull but who on this night was enormously warm and charming. After (delicious) rhubarb pie and coffee, Jackie floated around the room to stare into other faces and for a time sat nose to nose on a sofa with Clark’s wife, Marnie Clifford, who Harry said was divine. She seemed as happy as she is likely to get.

  The next day Holbrooke told me Jackie called and said, “Oh, Dick, wasn’t it the most wonderful night! It was like the evenings Jack and I used to have at the White House! Distinguished and powerful men! Beautiful women of accomplishment! Dick, Dick. It was just like an evening at Versailles!” Which compensated for the fact that she tellingly and, I am sure with considered forethought, didn’t write me a thank-you note.

  America, as with everything else, makes you more professional about entertaining. In London we just threw fun parties. Here one sees what works and formats it, so that each dinner is the dress rehearsal for the next one. In our case, the small tables, the long cocktail hour, the fast service, and the mobile dessert and coffee mean no one is stuck with anyone too long. I can’t talk to a dinner partner for more than twenty-five minutes a side without desperation setting in. No one has more than that to give, in my view, unless they are having an affair with the person next to them. And the guests seem to love it. Plus, having the dining room double as the library, books floor to ceiling, makes it all feel much cozier and more intimate.

  I reflected afterward that had Jack Kennedy been alive, Clifford would have been the man Jackie turned to to handle her divorce from Jack.

  Maybe some of these thoughts were in Jackie’s head as she carried her strange, tight stare away into the spring night.

  Monday, June 10, 1991

  I have been in hell with a screw-up on the Mrs. Thatcher profile that was entirely self-inflicted. Have been really whipped for it, not without justification. In the press release that went out with Maureen Orth’s piece, our London PR Belinda Harley pulled out and hyped up Maggie’s quote about Dennis Thatcher: “Home is where you go when you have nothing better to do.” It sparked a huge media reaction in England, with numerous pieces by loudmouthed Fleet Street women columnists sounding off about the low priority of marriage and domestic life on Mrs. T’s agenda, and on the other side her supporters were calling us purveyors of trash. In fact, the full Mrs. T quote in Orth’s piece was much less damning than the release’s truncated version. But, despite my inept attempts to explain that, the UK media kept confusing the two. I went off on vacation with the family to Bermuda, having fired off an unwise letter to The Spectator (who had pummeled me the worst), calling my most savage attacker, the Tory historian Paul Johnson, an “empurpled blowhard.”

  I returned to the seaside cottage where we were staying after a perfect day at the beach to receive a frantic call from Pam McCarthy. It seems Mrs. Thatcher’s press office had been taping the interview as well and now released the whole transcript to The Times. It showed her quotes had been shamelessly truncated by us in the release, thereby giving a totally incorrect gloss to what Thatcher meant. In the Times script we could see that Mrs. Thatcher was not being dismissive about home—quite the contrary. She was talking about its place in the minds of grown-up children who have left it: “We are a very close family even though we do our own thing. That is what family life is about. This [home] is where you come to with your problems. This is from where you go, to do whatever you wish. And sometimes if something happens and we don’t see the family as often as we would wish, and they go off, I say: ‘Well, look, home is where you come when you haven’t anything better to do. We are always there.’”

  Fuck. Why did I write that over-the-top blowhard note about Paul Johnson? The transcript should not really have been a problem because it’s what Orth had more or less quoted in the piece, but with my being marooned on vacation, my efforts to differentiate what we published in the magazine from what we put out in the release only seemed to make it worse. The UK news narrative was now that we had falsely quoted the prime minister with malicious intent.

  The Bermuda phone was red-hot with press calls from London. I tried to get Harry out of the ocean to advise me, but he had just been stung by a jellyfish. To my consternation I could view him from the porch, peeing on his own leg, while Izzy screamed from her stroller on the deck, Georgie was drubbing me about going to the beach, and the credibility of the magazine’s reporting was imploding on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Worse was to come. The released Maggie tape got me flayed anew in every British paper. I should have convened a conference call between Pam, Belinda, and Orth and made a coherent full-throated apology, but this whole debacle was ruining the kids’ vacation and I kept dealing with it too quickly. “Empurpled blowhard” was now the ubiquitous quote of the week. Johnson wrote a follow-up column in The Spectator, saying I should be “horsewhipped.” The worst was Simon Jenkins, as editor of The Times, writing a signed editorial, something he never does, calling out my disgraceful journalistic ethics. VF was now totally in the penalty box after all the great work we have been doing this year. All because of rushing. No doubt Jackie Onassis, remembering Arthur Schlesinger urging Philip Habib to read the piece, will be thoroughly gratified, and it’s so frustrating because the piece itself is so good and quoted Thatcher accurately. I have let Orth down. She is pissed and I am mortified and must be MUCH MUCH more careful in the future AND BE LESS IMPULSIVE AND NEVER RESPOND WITHOUT FULL MEETING OF ALL PLAYERS INVOLVED AND CAREFUL LANGUAGE AND APOLOGIZING PROPERLY AT THE RIGHT MOMENT WHEN WE FUCK UP.

  Sunday, July 7, 1991

  Nervous about going to England after the Thatcher debacle but had to do so for the fund-raiser the British edition is doing for the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I walked into Harry’s Bar for lunch and there was Princess Margaret at a table full of grand wrinklies, and they all stopped talking when they saw me. “You are notorious,” George Weidenfeld told me. Ouch.

  I can’t even remember how we got into this Oxford thing, or why, perhaps outreach from the beetle prof, but we took fifty guests to a Haydn concert at the Sheldonian Theatre followed by a magnificent dinner cooked by Raymond Blanc at Convocation House.

  Actually, a bit of history was a soothing relief after my Thatcher shaming. The beauty of the Sheldonian was breathtaking. When I was an undergrad we took it all so much for granted. The magnificent concert, played on sixteenth-century instruments, made me feel as if we had time traveled to a small party for James II’s court. And when Prince Charles arrived in a sudden blaze of royal glamour, that sense of another time enveloped us all the more. I felt we should all be bowing our bewigged heads like in The Madness of King George.

  I’ve met Prince Charles on numerous occasions and never thought him the least bit charismatic. But this time one felt the full force of the HRH effect. As he strode by in his red gown with white ermine collar, followed by the slithery quiet of ceremonial proctors, the rush of history swirled up to the Christopher Wren ceiling. We got a whiff of what Diana fell for in the first place, the jet-set tan, the bright blue eyes, and the flash of impeccable tailoring beneath the academic gown.

  Suddenly, all the gossip about the royal marriage fell into a new, constitutional perspective, a rending of social fabric that was more than just a tabloid affair. The Charles-Di rift we all feast on is not just a problem marriage. The crown is in crisis. The prince looked desperately unhappy all through the soaring strains of The Creation. He had a face of real tragedy, as if in deep spiritual torment, which he couldn’t hide from all the sideways peeking of the guests. Having felt so sympathetic to Diana until now, I suddenly had an intuition that perhaps he is being set up. The outcry in all the Sunday papers about his not giving a thirtieth birthday party for Diana is suspect. She was, no doubt, the one who leaked the melancholy information that she drove the children
back to London alone the night of her birthday. She is playing the press like a fiddle, and since Charles cannot answer or explain, he’s coming off as the villain. As Sir Charles Mackerras led the choir in “God Save the Queen,” I had an impending sense of great national pain if they were to throw it all away.

  Tuesday, July 23, 1991

  After the three-week-long persecution of the Thatcher affair comes the happy distraction of the Demi Moore cover on the August issue. When Annie and I first discussed doing Demi, I thought how great it would be to show her pregnant instead of doing the normal thing with stars who are over three months gone and cheat the cover with a head shot or some other disguise. But being Annie, she went one better. She did Demi in profile, yes, full body, yes, but also … naked! She unveiled it after first showing me the shots of Demi in brief summer dress, explaining she had just done these others privately. But as soon as I saw that warm, golden image of the utterly naked, enormously pregnant, totally glorious Demi, I knew this was the shot we had to have. I felt retrospectively liberated from a long 1990 trying to hide the expanding Izzy, the vicarious shout of joy of showing Demi’s bump to the world. Women need this, dammit! Annie was the persuasive genius who got on the phone and got Demi to agree to make this private picture public. But kudos to Demi too for her bravery and willingness to go out on the edge.