The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  We have wanted so much to do a story that moved Vanity Fair decisively on from the eighties, that made a statement of modernity, progressiveness, freshness, openness, after the heavy Trumpy glitz of that decade. I have been beating my brains out looking for the social commentary that would achieve it. And now, in one simple, dazzling image, Annie has the home run. This is it. This is what a celebrity looks like in the nineties. Not just natural but au naturel! And it’s a wonderful feminist statement at the same time.

  Now I was afraid I would be stopped from doing it by the circulation department, after Walmart went batshit with the Roseanne Barr cover. So I took the precaution of showing first Alex, then Si. Alex just looked quizzical and said, “Are you sure, my dear?” and shrugged. And Si did his pensive gerbil face and finally said, “Why not?” This, in the end, is the joy of working at Condé Nast, particularly when Ron Galotti showed buyers at the big chains to ensure they didn’t reject it—and they did. So, resourceful Ron has had the issue shrink-wrapped for the newsstand like a porno mag. Makes it feel even more like forbidden fruit.

  I told Hamilton South to try to get the Today show to use the image. Which now seems a joke, because this cover has immediately gone into the stratosphere. I expected some buzz, but not what is unfolding—a media orgy that uses the cover on TV eight straight nights in a row—every network news show, Primetime Live, Entertainment Tonight, Good Morning America, plus Annie as Woman of the Week with Peter Jennings on ABC and umpteen references to it by Johnny Carson, Arsenio Hall, David Brinkley, and on and on. The shrink-wrap stunt makes it hotter. It has ignited a million nationwide talk radio shows and newspaper opinion polls about whether or not we should have shown a pregnant belly without clothing. (The Atlanta Constitution is running a front-page poll asking if the newsstand should have banned the picture and five thousand readers have responded. Most in favor of publication.) It seems we have broken the last visual taboo. And the perfection of it was that it was an unassailable platform for controversy. Who’s ever managed to shock with family values before?

  Seventy-five million in TV views so far, and fifty-nine newspapers, not including all the covers in Latin America, Europe, and India that have started to roll in. Plus a full page in Magazine Week hailing it as a “stroke of marketing genius.” We should sell well over a million in total. Letters have poured in to me from all over the world from other editors saluting it. Pregnant women see it as a breakthrough image for them.

  It’s such a happy boost. Jane Sarkin, who was the point person for it all, is ecstatic, which is great since she takes so much crap from Hollywood flaks all day long. Pregnant Demi has been like a rebirth for us all. Hail Annie! She did it again! I feel a surge of energy and creativity that will infuse the whole second half of the year, almost like being stuck in the mud, breaking free, and careening off at twice the speed.

  Friday, August 16, 1991

  Isabel’s christening. Our divine daughter has turned into this unbelievably joyous bundle of protein. She is like a baby Olga Korbut, her tough, plump little legs, her ever-moving, agile little body. She has a special mummy smile that melts my heart, a big, wide smile with two teeth that makes me want to squash her with mad kisses.

  We christened her last weekend on one of the nicest days we could have dreamed of, at the Church of the Atonement, Quogue’s little clapboard church, as we did for G. It was a glorious day. We had all the friends over for a buffet lunch on the porch and a local band playing at the entrance. Izzy looked so adorable in her frothy little dress, with those huge eyes in her china doll face. She loved being swooped up and down by all the guests, grabbed the rector’s cross from around his neck, and chomped on it happily. She has all Harry’s power-packed energy and his equable temperament. Nothing fazes her as she moves from one passionate absorption to the next. How lucky I am.

  Wednesday, August 28, 1991

  Last week Si asked me to lunch out of the blue. He rarely does, so I knew something was afoot. The issue of What Next has suddenly become pressing. I sensed this lunch was part of some next fulfillment of a plan, which made me anxious.

  Right after the Perrier water at the Four Seasons, Si launches into “So who do you think I should be considering to fill Alex’s shoes?” (Alex has just come out of the hospital for the second time in two months.) “Who do YOU think, is surely more important?” I said.

  “Well, there’s Rochelle Udell,” said Si. (Huh?) “She’s done a wonderful job at The New Yorker and Random House.”

  “She’s a good art director, yes,” I said tersely, suddenly fatigued by this runaround.

  “And then there’s you.” I wanted to throw a bread roll at his head. I said nothing.

  He asked, “But would you find this job creative enough?”

  I replied, “Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But clearly the time is drawing near when I have to think about the future.” He hurriedly continued, “Well, let’s talk some more about Alex’s job.” And painted it in terms of it being the sagacious role of his discreet consultant. (No thanks.) I said what I thought was a better idea, moving VF into other fields, widening it into media beyond just a magazine. Books. Movie production. Radio. A TV show like 60 Minutes. Susan Mercandetti, a fantastic producer from ABC, came to see me this week about developing VF as a news show. She’s so good I immediately thought about what she could also bring to the mag as another contributing editor. There could be cross-pollination, developing a show and stories for TV that could also work in the pages of VF. She totally sees that a magazine with the kind of fast potency we now have should be thinking laterally as well as vertically. If we lock ourselves into just being a magazine, it will be diminished returns, ultimately. We are a brand, and with the London edition launched, an international one, and should start producing other forms of media from our material. Si seemed a bit intrigued by this passionate riff from me and flushed in his rising-interest way. We adjourned our lunch and he went off for a week’s vacation.

  Tuesday, September 24, 1991

  Si hasn’t been in the Four Seasons for ten days. When Si is not in the Four Seasons it means something is up. He’s hiring someone big or buying something. But whom or what? And will it affect me? In a moment of paranoia I thought he could be buying Rolling Stone as he has long wanted to do and making Jann Wenner editorial director as part of the package. (Not a bad idea. At least he’s brilliant.) I called Ovitz to suss it out. He said he’d check with Wenner but reported back that, after oblique discussions about other stuff, Wenner revealed he’s not in selling mode or mood. So what’s cooking in the hamster cage? Definitely something, and after the way the Coleridge move went down I don’t like it.

  The reaction to Demi Moore doesn’t stop. Letters pour in from ecstatic women every day. We’ve sold 548,058 copies on the newsstand (an 82 percent increase on July newsstand sales), giving us a total sale of 1,127,521. It’s phenomenal. And the joy of Ron Galotti as VF publisher knows no bounds. I finally feel I have a business partner who gets it and can leverage our heat. We’re now the hottest book with advertisers as well as readers. Calvin Klein took a 116-page outsert (as it’s called), which got us gold-dust business coverage everywhere and of course made every Condé editor of a fashion book green with envy. I feel a moment coming. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

  Someone is going to make a major play. But what is it to be?

  Monday, November 25, 1991

  Mick Jagger called me today in agitation about a Nancy Collins cover-story interview, something that’s taken me two years to get. Nancy is a razzle-dazzle blonde famous for tell-all Q and As; she’s a good addition to our cover-writer repertoire. Before the shoot Mike Caruso called and said, “I’m worried about Nancy. She seems to be flipping out. Think you should call her.” But when I did I found she’d already left for London. Next thing we know, urgent faxes are arriving from Jagger’s people, demanding we take Nancy off the story. Caruso told me Nancy had called him to say it was
clear Mick hated women because of his denying mother, and that she had “let Mick have it” over his obvious desire only to be with women who don’t answer back. Caruso reminded her we had three interview times with Jagger, two before Annie’s shoot and one after, and that we had agreed she’d delay tough questions till the shoot was in the bag. I called the Stones people to try to keep the show on the road and they put Mick on the line.

  “Look, it’s like this,” the loud, cockney voice of “Satisfaction” blurted from my speakerphone. “Nancy keeps on about me mum. She’s just got this bee in her bonnet about me mum. Says she was my ‘problem,’ but you know, Tina, she wasn’t a problem. It was me dad who was the problem. I mean,” the foghorn voice continued, “I’ve done interviews before, you know. Quite a lot of interviews in my time. But she keeps on about me mum. So, Tina, finally, I said, ‘Look, Nancy, I am trying as hard as I can to remember what it was like when I was three, but quite honestly, what’s the point?’ Then she seemed to get all pissed off at the end of lunch because I ’ad to go and try on all the clothes with Annie and Marina for your shoot. And I couldn’t sit there talking any more about me mum. So, Tina, then she says that I only want to fuck bimbos! But, honest, I think my girls ’ave been a mixed bag. I’ve ’ad my share of bimbos, I s’pose, but some of ’em have been quite bright. I mean Bianca’s quite bright. Anyway, can you sort it?” It was so surreal. The totally sane rock-and-roll star interviewed by a totally out-there journalist. I called Nancy to tell her to pedal back the mum assault till we got the pictures and she answered the phone in a “take no prisoners” voice. “You’ve been manipulated,” she shouted. “Manipulated by a celebrity! This interview will see the light of day even if not in your magazine!” Slam. I dispatched Stephen Schiff to London to save the cover and write three thousand words on Mick fast.

  Tuesday, November 26, 1991

  Si called down and said he didn’t want Ron Galotti supervising UK VF as had been promised, because it would mean discounting the quoted rate card, customary in the UK but a no-no here. US advertisers might hear of it, he said, and start expecting the same discount in the US edition. He’s not necessarily wrong, but this question of Ron overseeing UK had all been settled a long time ago. Now Si’s arbitrarily reneged on it. I am pissed. So many of my strategic editorial moves have turned to profit, then I’m left out of decisions and presented with a fait accompli. Feel dissed by his patriarchal bullshit. Consoled by Leslie Bennett’s important piece in the new issue about pedophilia in the Catholic Church. She’s exposed the cover-up of a New Orleans priest who exploited young men for sex and collected kiddie porn.

  Sunday, December 8, 1991

  I recruited the music-world lawyer Allen Grubman to cochair the next Phoenix House gala with me. The man is a rolling sound bite, I just want to sit in his office all day with a tape recorder on.

  A few nuggets. On a phone call from Robert De Niro.

  “Bobby calls me today and says, ‘I’m at an airport.’”

  “Which airport?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Which country?”

  “What are you? A travel agent?”

  Re my wish list for his help on Phoenix House entertainment: “What’s this? Madonna? Bruce Springsteen? Want me to get you Gorbachev to make his resignation speech at Phoenix House?”

  Instructed by me to raise money, he calls Jonathan Tisch on the speakerphone. “Jono, it’s Allen. I want you to do something for me. Phoenix House twenty-fifth anniversary.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I heard from Tina Brown. I bought a table.”

  “No, Jono, I want you to sell another five.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Allen. I can’t. I want people to say to me when we meet, ‘Hi, Jonathan, how’s Laura and Charles?’ I don’t want them to run when they see me coming.”

  “Jonathan, I want to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “How’s Laura, how’s Charles? Now buy five tables.”

  Grubman’s first charity mistake—this is not his world—was asking the producer Mark Goodson, whose wife, Suzanne, left him for Mitch Rosenthal, to buy a table. “He told me this story about his wife!” said Allen. “I mean, how could this be? I thought Mitch Rosenthal was Albert Schweitzer or something. I mean humanitarians don’t shtup, do they?”

  And then: “Can anyone tell me why the rich are so cheap?”

  Tuesday, December 10, 1991

  Marie Brenner called to tell me an extraordinary incident that took place last night at the NYC Parks black-tie gala at Tavern on the Green after the opening of the Streisand movie The Prince of Tides. She was sitting demurely in her black dinner suit at the parks commissioner Betsy Gotbaum’s table when she felt something cold and wet running down her back. Out of the corner of her eye she saw waiters with trays of wine moving around and assumed one of them had spilled the vino. Unwilling to embarrass the waiter, she didn’t turn around. Until the other guests at the table started pointing and yelping, “Oh my God! Look what he just did!” The “he” in question was Donald Trump! She saw his familiar Elvis coif making off across the Crystal Room. The sneaky, petulant infant was clearly still stewing about her takedown in VF over a year ago and had taken a glass of wine from the tray and emptied it down her back! What a coward! He couldn’t even confront her to her face! Marie was as outraged as she was incredulous but chose to ignore it. Everyone knows he’s going broke and he spent most of the evening canoodling with his pouty blow-up doll, Marla Maples.

  1992

  RHAPSODY IN BLUE

  Monday, January 20, 1992

  Christmas with the kids at the Elkhorn Ranch already seems so long ago.

  My contract is nearing expiration and I can’t decide whether to renew. What else could I do? Can’t go back to London as Harry’s having a ball at Random House, minting bestsellers. The Alex job doesn’t get more appealing. I would be frustrated to be out of the business of assigning stories and would miss working with writers. Editorial director may sound powerful but it’s really just courtier work, and trying to improve the magazines incrementally without offending turf-warrior editors. Plus half the Condé mags don’t even interest me—Self, Brides, HG, Glamour. Anna is making Vogue sizzle and I wouldn’t want to interfere there, except on the features side, and if I did, that would just create icicle aggravation I don’t need.

  On Thursday Si came down to talk to me. I thought it was another run around the Alex succession track but it was about The New Yorker. It is, he told me, losing 19 million a year.

  Immediately my head started to spin. The dual emotions of agony and excitement. The desire to raise my intellectual sights is like a thirst. But the struggle is that TNY would make me busier and given what G needs, life would be more difficult, not less. He cannot stand any alteration in my schedule if I promise to be there and then am late. He’s on a good course at Stephen Gaynor School with all the personal attention but I can’t kid myself. And then again, VF is on such a roll and making real money. I’d love the new challenge that would deploy my deeper skills as an editor and provide a more challenging outlet to raise my game. The joy of no more conversations about how to get Madonna for a photo shoot! Could I do it and still be a decent mother to G and Izzy?

  I feel at sea about whether to trust Si. He keeps proving that he’s in the bombshell business. In a recession that’s killing three magazines a month, VF is now flying. We seem to be hanging on to the circulation gains with Demi Moore, holding at over a million in combined newsstand and subs. Ron’s got the ads up substantially in the next quarter, a flaming miracle. But I know everything can change in a minute. I have been reading Robert Massie’s fascinating book Dreadnought that Harry’s publishing about the prelude to World War I. I realize there is a bit of the kaiser in Si’s whims. For all his support of me these last years, it’s been such a dance to head off his secretly cooked-up moves. The company needs outside input, not just family conferences. He blew me off when I raised again moving VF into new arenas. Would
n’t even consider it. I sat the ABC producer Susan Mercandetti next to him at a dinner to co-opt him on the TV idea, and he said, “Before you start to talk to me I want you to know I think a TV show is a terrible idea. Why would you dilute a great brand like Vanity Fair by putting it on air?” He’s wrong.

  There is something disturbing about the thought of all these nepotistic decision makers with the lives and jobs of others in their hands. This is what everyone warned me of when I turned down the move to Hearst. Bennack runs a professional shop. Condé Nast is a court, always dependent on the favor of the king. And yet.

  The upside of a court is there is only one person who decides.

  Thursday January 23, 1992

  This morning Si called me upstairs and sat me down next to him in the chair near his desk. “Alex and I have been talking,” he said. “How much do you read … The New Yorker?” A long pause. “Not much lately,” I said. A longer pause. It felt endless. Had I just disqualified myself? He behaved as if I said the opposite. “How would you go about it?” he said. My turn to pause. I thought about the issues of The New Yorker I do love, the ones from the Harold Ross period of the twenties and thirties. I bought a set of them at the Strand.

  There’s a crispness, variety, and pace in them that’s vanished from the current model. The use of artists and cartoonists in the Ross days was bold, irreverent, sometimes full page. The covers were social commentary of the era. Nothing like the tepid, ornamental images we associate with The New Yorker now. In Ross’s magazine, the vitality and varied lengths of pieces and deft use of spot art made it feel current and alive. You could feel a news edge, sense a metropolitan eyebrow raised. There was less of today’s endless scrolls of print, the impenetrable absence of definition, the sense that you are in a word church. I told Si I could not edit Shawn’s or Gottlieb’s New Yorker, but Ross’s New Yorker spoke to me as if it were published yesterday. He smiled when I said all this, then said we would talk again soon.