by Tina Brown
But it was me who was out. Soon my parents were once again loading my belongings into the trunk of the car for the one-way journey back to Little Marlow.
In despair, my parents sent me to Beechlawn Tutorial College in Oxford, a “crammer” for a floating population of foreigners and hopeless rich girls who had dropped out of real school but wanted to try for Oxford or Cambridge anyway. Girls were billeted around the town of Oxford in faculty-approved digs and sent here and there to individual sessions with tutors. (I was lodged at a convent where the nuns forced you to read over dinner, which was absolutely fine with me.) My tutor, the excellent Alison Holmes, made me double down on my English literary studies, as storytelling and criticism were where I excelled. In March of 1971, when I was all of seventeen, Mrs. Holmes decided I was ready for the entrance exam to Oxford. It’s remarkable that with such a checkered academic record I somehow got in, but British academia was very different then. The trio of condescending dons who decided your fate at the all-important interview wanted only to know if you could think. Oxford would take care of the rest.
The telegram arrived for me six weeks later in Paris, where I was on a student exchange trip, learning French while tearing around to discos every night in the beat-up Citroën of a friend of my host family. It read, PLEASED TO INFORM OFFERING PLACE AT ST ANNE’S COLLEGE OXFORD STOP.
I went up to St. Anne’s six months later, in October of 1971, to “read” (i.e., major in) English. St. Anne’s was still all-female in those days, of course, and disappointingly un-medieval in its architecture. I instantly envied what the boys had, the spires of Magdalen and Christ Church and Brasenose and all that Brideshead Revisited scenic bliss.
But St. Anne’s in the seventies was the most intellectually exciting of the women’s colleges. The great novelist Iris Murdoch adorned its English faculty. So did the incomparable teacher Dorothy Bednarowska, an Anne Bancroft brunette whose deeply hooded eyes, elegant black-stockinged legs, and crackling asperity riveted us. “Mrs. Bed” served her students sherry and smoked slim, sophisticated cigarettes that accumulated quivering towers of ash as she applied her relentless rigor to the texts of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. She demanded relentless rigor in return. Her forensic deconstruction of Dr. Lydgate’s frailties in Middlemarch was a tour de force of literary castration. I worshipped her. She taught me not only the joy of deep textual study—critical for an editor—but also the edgy pride of being at an all-women’s college. From our first tutorial I never again pined for what the boys had.
Instead, I dived into all the glories that Oxford could offer in student drama, journalism, and Zuleika Dobson romance. I was swept off my feet in sophomore year by Martin Amis, then a twenty-three-year-old literary lothario who had graduated by then but still had deep roots in Oxford. He was small and Jaggeresque, his chief charms his voice, a rich, iconoclastic croak, and the blond hair that curled onto the collar of his velvet jackets. Martin and I met at a London literary party, where we broke the ice by chatting about the current issue of the New Statesman. I remarked that I had a particular passion for the work of the Staggers contributor Bruno Holbrooke. It was a longer evening than I expected after that.
At Oxford, I wrote and produced a play—Under the Bamboo Tree, about a love triangle—that was chosen for the Edinburgh Festival and the London Fringe and won the Sunday Times Student Drama Award. And I signed on as a writer for the (now unfortunately named) student magazine, Isis. It was edited by one of my closest friends, then and now: Sally Emerson, later an acclaimed novelist, who married her Oxford boyfriend, Peter Stothard. (Two decades later he became editor of The Times, then of the Times Literary Supplement.)
At Isis I discovered that journalism was a wonderful excuse to satisfy the curiosity I possess in abundance. If you read or hear something that pings your antennae, you have license to pick up the phone and launch a barrage of intrusive questions. Until that moment I had imagined myself as a novelist or a playwright. But tracking down real people and learning the truth about them now seemed much more exciting than making stuff up. And I learned that there is no fun in the world greater than the frenzy of closing a magazine on deadline.
A boyfriend at Wadham College, Stephen Glover, who in 1986 would go on to cofound The Independent, drove me to Somerset one day to interview a son of my literary hero Evelyn Waugh for an Isis series on distinguished Oxford alumni. Auberon Waugh, known as Bron, was himself a prolific, acerbic, lethally funny literary critic, novelist, and columnist for The Spectator and Private Eye. Physically he resembled his father: he had his little potbelly, sandy pate, and rimless glasses. But I loved him for his wit, and for a decade after our meeting we conducted a prolific, romantically charged pen friendship. He introduced me to half the literary names of London, including Nigel Dempster, and he invited me to a lunch then considered as cool as an invitation backstage at a Dylan concert: the biweekly Private Eye hackfest upstairs at a Soho pub, the Coach and Horses. My Isis account of that lunch, in which I made as much fun of the Eye staff as they did of the politicians they sometimes invited, launched me as an enfant terrible of the British media. The Eye got its revenge by referring to me ever after as “the buxom hackette,” but the piece, and my subsequent contributions to the Staggers, caught the eye of the most important editor working in Fleet Street.
Harold Evans, known to almost everyone as Harry and as of 2004 to Buckingham Palace as Sir Harold, reigned for fourteen years as the fearless, crusading editor of the UK’s most admired quality newspaper, The Sunday Times. One of his achievements was creating a model for investigative journalism, the anonymous Insight team, celebrated among much else for exposing the top British spy, Kim Philby, as a Russian agent as well as the malfeasance of the drug company that created the great Thalidomide disaster. (In 2002, readers of the Press Gazette and the British Journalism Review would vote Harry the greatest British newspaper editor of all time, which has made it even harder for me to win an argument.)
Lunching with him one day, Pat Kavanagh, the influential (and stunningly beautiful) literary agent, thrust some clips of my New Statesman articles and my Isis piece on Private Eye into Harry’s hand. “Read these,” she commanded.
I didn’t hear anything for weeks. The Sunday Times was in the thick of investigating the defective design of a DC-10 that had killed 346 passengers. Then, one afternoon, I got a call from the office of Mr. Evans and was asked to come around to the paper’s headquarters to see him. The fact that the mighty Mr. E had read my insignificant jottings (on a train journey to Manchester, he later told me) and actually wanted to meet me was, to me, heart-stopping.
I arrived at the gray fortress of great journalism on Grays Inn Road near King’s Cross ten minutes early. His secretary, the redoubtable Joan Thomas, told me to wait outside. Mr. Evans, she said firmly, was working on the front page and could not be disturbed. An hour ticked by, and then another. She suggested I come back the next day but I said no, I’d rather wait. When she went to the bathroom I surged through Harry’s office door, determined to get my shot. Overcome by my own impudence, I froze. Amid a platoon of shirtsleeved editors grouped around a high layout table, my future husband was sketching out the front page. Looking up from the layouts, a pair of dazzling blue eyes met mine. “Don’t bother me now, love,” he said. (He has said it a lot since.) It’s fair to say that as I backed out of the room, I fell in love with his professional absorption.
I soon started writing for The Sunday Times. Less than a year later, when our affair bloomed in 1977, I chose to stop. Harry was still married and our affair was a scandale. Then came the call from Tatler.
All my lit-crit writer friends from Oxford thought I should decline the offer to undertake the revamp of Tatler. They thought that society magazines were inherently, irrevocably uncool. But I saw opportunity. Poring over musty bound volumes of old issues, I dreamed of a magazine that would combine the literary sharpness of the original eighteenth-century coffeehouse Tatler with the social exuberance of the Ja
zz Age iteration, overlaid with modern irreverence. Plus, it would be my own show. I could give an outlet to all the talent I knew was out there, much of it undiscovered. And, as I would realize only later, the timing was perfect.
The same month I took over the editorship of Tatler, in June 1979, a new prime minister took over 10 Downing Street.
After a long Labour government malaise climaxing in the “winter of discontent” of 1978–79, when every trade union went on the warpath, Margaret Thatcher’s ascendance and the Tory victory unleashed a thrusting upward mobility. It gave a new lease on life to the fraying upper middle classes. And there was another windfall for Tatler’s editorial fortunes and business prospects: Lady Diana Spencer’s emergence, rise, and conquest of Prince Charles and the British public. It was the twentieth century’s biggest social story since King Edward VIII traded the throne for Mrs. Simpson in 1936.
Lady Di’s world was Tatler’s world. She was nineteen; most of our staffers were only a few years older. Her life’s trajectory resembled that of many of my classmates at Hampden House. We were able to write about her world with insider-y insolence. Tatler became the go-to shop for every nuance of the royal romance. The Di story would be to Tatler what O. J. Simpson later was to CNN.
Editing Tatler with no experience, I often felt like William Boot, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s peerless Fleet Street satire Scoop, in which Boot, the timid, clueless country life correspondent of Lord Copper’s newspaper, the Daily Beast, is mistakenly sent to cover an inexplicable war in Africa.
By now I was living with Harry. Our Ponsonby Terrace house was nestled in a quiet Regency street behind the Tate Gallery. Ancient ivy festooned the old brick wall around the small back garden. I spent a lot of time creaking up and down the four flights of stairs to my study. On Fridays we would take off for serene writing weekends at a country cottage in Brasted, Kent. (Eventually, in 1981, when his divorce came through, we got married. The impromptu ceremony took place at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton home of the journalist Sally Quinn and the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, with a small gaggle of writer friends in attendance—on my side, Vogue’s Joan Buck, New York magazine’s Marie Brenner, and Nora Ephron; and on Harry’s side, his Sunday Times mate Anthony Holden, the Observer’s theater writer, John Heilpern—Joan’s British husband—and the Sunday Times’ gangly Northern Ireland correspondent David Blundy with his young daughter, Anna. Ben Bradlee hung a boom box in the bushes to play Handel’s Water Music, and Sally supplied a picnic wedding feast from Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack.)
Back at Ponsonby Terrace my illustrious husband offered me more and better on-the-fly editing tutorials than anything I could have obtained in a magazine training class. It was as true then as it is now that if you ask him a question about journalism, you are liable to get a seminar. When it came to Tatler’s page layout, I needed one. At home one evening when I was fretting over how to present a scoopy story about Princess Margaret and her social arbiter the Hon. Colin Tennant, he gave me a crash course in page design. He projected a photo of a crowded dance party in Mustique on our sitting room wall, zoomed in on Princess Margaret and her dancing partner, Tennant, and drew a rectangle around them in pencil on the peach wallpaper. The couple were now the vivid focus. My first lesson in picture cropping and my first double-page spread. I sometimes wonder if those red pencil marks are still there beneath the new owner’s wallpaper.
Tatler had a staff of just twelve and a miserly budget of a hundred thousand pounds a year. Our editing motto was: If you don’t have a budget, get yourself a point of view. Of necessity I wrote a good many of our pieces myself, including a spiky monthly guide to London’s eligible bachelors, which for obvious reasons appeared under a pseudonym, Rosie Boot. “What about an exciting émigré for a change?” reads a 1981 Rosie Boot entry. “Gregory Shenkman is half-Russian but wholly available and in a city overrun with effeminate one-shave-a-day men is refreshingly hairy.”
My early staff hires were young Turks with an abundance of attitude. They were critical to our success. All but one of those I will mention ended up crossing the Atlantic to join me at Vanity Fair, and their names will recur often in the pages ahead. Let’s call the roll.
* * *
Nicholas Coleridge, twenty-two, fresh out of Eton and Cambridge and an internship at Harpers & Queen, was the staff ideas-and-attitude kid. He had turbocharged social energy and wrote wicked, sharply observed pieces about the precocious world in which he nightly socialized. (He later rose to be president of the whole of Condé Nast International.)
Miles Chapman, twenty-seven, was the cranky, bitterly funny copy chief. When he arrived at Tatler he wore Rupert Bear sweaters and rimless glasses but soon shed fifteen pounds, dyed his hair inky blue, and became an avatar of gay style. He had a genius for the critical details—headlines, blurbs, captions—that define a magazine’s voice. His own absurdly overrefined accent was manufactured from an adolescence listening to classical music commentary and poetry recitals on BBC Radio 3 while hiding from an unpleasant stepfather in the bedroom of a humble semidetached house in Surrey.
Michael Roberts, Tatler’s fashion editor, stolen from the style pages of The Sunday Times, was the art-school graduate son of a black father posted to England after the war who left Michael’s mother, a secretary, pregnant. He wore the same oversized black cashmere roll-necks all year round and smoked long menthol cigarettes. Aloof, feline, with a smile of disarming sweetness when he sensed a target for satire, he was as clever with copy as he was with clothes. He led a vagabond life, rarely cashing a check, his own ineffable chicness often held together with safety pins, a fashion statement in itself.
Only one person could track where Michael was and what he was up to—his assistant, Gabé Doppelt, the petite daughter of rich South African parents. She was nineteen and in charge of classified ads when I arrived—an undemanding job, since there weren’t any—until I noticed that she was the queen of Get Shit Done, a role she played not just for me and Michael but for Anna Wintour when she joined her as her right hand at Vogue in New York in 1987.
A vital need in start-up chaos is a managing editor. I poached the preternaturally competent and diplomatic Chris Garrett from an ailing fashion magazine to crack the whip on Tatler’s deadlines and budget.
Finally, Sarah Giles. A society girl with a champagne personality who at the time was an exotic travel agent, Sarah was like something out of the Happy Valley set in Kenya in the 1930s, where some of her aristocratic forebears had indeed partied up a storm. She had no familiarity with matters editorial, but on a hunch I made her our features editor. She couldn’t and didn’t edit or write, but she had a talent I’ve considered crucial at every entity I’ve run: she could produce. She had a killer eye for a story and would beat the doors down to obtain access for a writer to get it done. The jingle of her dachshund’s chain (she always brought him to the office) followed by her booming laugh were the first sounds I heard when I got into the Tatler office in the morning.
Was it a coincidence that much of the talent at Tatler was comprised of rebels against the British class system? I tend to think it was the source of much of its energy and irreverence.
Tatler was soon giving our primary competitors, Harpers & Queen and Vogue, a run for their money. Thanks to Michael Roberts’s connections from his work at The Sunday Times, top-of-the-line photographers shot for us for next to nothing—Norman Parkinson, the society portraitist with the handlebar mustache; kinky, outrageous Helmut Newton; raffish David Bailey, who, because Tatler couldn’t afford the airfares, once drove me to Paris in his litter-strewn jeep for a cover shoot with his ex-wife Catherine Deneuve; Derry Moore, now the 12th Earl of Drogheda, whose impeccable taste gave us ravishing portfolios of beautiful houses and rooms.
The Tatler team was wildly competitive. British Vogue was the grandest galleon of the glossies and always got unquestioned access to the highlights of the social and fashion season. Its duchess-like editor, Beatrix Miller, used to small-
wave people she was tired of talking to out of her office with a “That’s all” reminiscent of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. At lunchtime she would adjourn to the restaurant Apicella near Vogue House and accept obeisance from passing luminaries.
Tatler’s cover story on Princess Caroline of Monaco was a gratifying triumph over our lordly rivals at Vogue, who thought they had her in the bag. As it happened, Michael Roberts was a close friend of Manolo Blahnik, not yet the cult figure he became in Sex and the City but already the sophisticated Chelsea cobbler at Zapata, where all the smartest girls bought their shoes. After repeated nos from formal channels, a tip-off from Manolo got Tatler in the game. The word was that Her Serene Highness was personally coming into Zapata to try on a pair of gold sandals. I wrote a personal note requesting a cover shoot and Michael Roberts had my request slipped into the box she would open to try them on, thus circumnavigating her ferocious gatekeepers. Within weeks we were both on our way to the rosy portals of the Rainier palace in Monte Carlo for the shoot.
Tatler’s finest hour was the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in July 1981. I had first met the princess-to-be in 1980 at the American embassy, during her engagement to Charles. She wore a dress of white organza and blue sequined chiffon that revealed her pale young shoulders, her neck circled by the sheen of a pearl choker fastened with a diamond clip. Her skin was apricot velvet, her eyes huge blue pools of feeling. She was very young and very hesitant, always blushing before she spoke, then contributing lighthearted small talk that broke the ice with simplicity and charm. As both writer and editor, I tracked her for all the years that followed, till lunch in New York with me and Anna Wintour, during the summer of 1997, two months before she died. She had come for a charity auction of her dresses at Christie’s. By then she had long been an accomplished superstar, the hesitancy replaced by self-possession. She was a media goddess, turning every head as she strode across the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant in three-inch heels and a dazzling green Chanel suit. But her conversation at lunch was all about loneliness.