The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  Everyone was there for Lana Turner but after an hour she still hadn’t appeared. Ron Busch of Pocket Books came over, looking ashen and sweaty. “Everyone’s asking where Lana is,” he said. “I can only say where I hope she is. In the shower having a vaginal douche.” (We are clearly a long way from Bloomsbury Square.) Owen Laster, a literary agent friend of Ed’s, was determined to hang on. “I have to see her,” he said, “I don’t care how rough she looks.” A gourd-faced publisher on the terrace said he’d once waited for three hours in vain for Lana Turner. Ron had to go up to her room and threaten to make her pay her own airfare and expenses if she didn’t come down immediately. She finally descended, lifted, tucked, and coiffed into chapel-of-rest perfection and escorted by a six-foot-two, thirty-year-old armpiece. “Nobody talks to me like that,” she apparently snarled at Busch when he entered her room, but just as the party was thinning out, she got herself downstairs and made one circuit stalking through the crowd, saying to each guest, “Don’t listen to a word from that jackass.” Humbled, Busch offered her a rose she ignored. “I guess I’ll have to eat shit all night,” he told Ed.

  I thought a lot about Lana Turner during Ed’s raucous Tex-Mex dinner afterward at the Café Cancun. What she’d been saying or going through in the room before she came down. Who the escort was—was he paid for? The drinking, the loneliness. I’m glad she did come down or she’d just hate herself even more the next morning. I want to get a piece done on her for Vanity Fair that uses her as a prism for all the glamour stars who age without pity. Dominick Dunne would be great on this.

  Bruce Harris, the head of Crown Publishing Group, joined us late for dinner.

  There was much talk about how popular their author Jean Auel is. “My author” was a refrain that kept coming up. You are just an author here, it seems, unless you make the bestseller list, then you become “our author.” Bruce Harris was so solicitous of Auel that he was almost as late as Lana Turner. “Bantam didn’t send the limo for Auel,” he said. “She’s our Margaret Mitchell,” said Bruce. “And forty-one weeks on the bestseller list. For that I send a limo.”

  Laster was still musing about Lana Turner. “She just stormed past Ron Busch,” he said wonderingly. “It was like Portrait in Black.” In their hearts you feel American publishers will always revere a movie star more than an author.

  At one a.m., spacey with jet lag, I finally headed for my room at the Adolphus. I caught sight of “our author” Lana Turner walking unsteadily into the elevator in front of me, her black bugle beads flashing.

  Friday, June 10, 1983

  Things have improved and regressed by turns. On Wednesday I was lunched by Alex Liberman at La Grenouille, the very elegant, flower-filled East Side restaurant that is his favorite haunt for romancing people he wants to hire. The waiters all treated him as if he was God and there were rapid French pleasantries about Alex’s wife, Tatiana, and the best things on the menu that day. Oscar de la Renta was at the next table, like a sleek panther with shiny black hair and eyes, gossiping with Bill Blass.

  It became clear that the lunch was Alex’s attempt to turn me into “his” person, which I found discomforting. Irritated though I am by Leo’s refusal to trust me, I don’t want to be another backstabbing Condé Nast courtier either. I think Alex is secretly a very worried man. Wrong as Leo is for VF, he is a loss to Vogue, where he was Alex’s trained circus animal. Alex could wind up losing his power base. At lunch he told me his worries that Leo is bringing too many “fags,” as he called them, to the magazine. He became quite vehement about it, and talked a lot about “the fag networks who controlled the art scene.” By which he meant, I suspect, the critics who don’t afford him the proper respect in their reviews of his own work. He also said in different ways that Leo has no taste and can’t write. If he thinks that, why did he wield cultural power at Vogue for so long? Leo is an omnivorous reader. The sad thing is that when he was at Vogue, I found Leo wonderful to work for. He was so appreciative of good writing and had read so much of it. He knew good sentences and he relished them.

  I didn’t want to say that some of Alex’s own contributions to VF have been its biggest problem. All that dated, kinetic splashiness on the page and thrown-around type he does. It feels quite wrong for a magazine that’s supposed to be about words as much as pictures. The layouts in VF need to be clean, strong, and classical, without this distracting frenzy. More Brodovitch, less Liberman!!

  I noticed that his attention span is actually short. And that his eyes are so black I wonder if he’s on medication. He has the habit of checking out for a few seconds and staring enigmatically into the distance. Sometimes his nostrils widen as he stifles a tiny yawn. I sensed he was just a bit bored with having to romance me, though we began to connect when we talked about his past on the great French news magazine Vu in the thirties, and how much he loved the pace of current affairs. I began to see that he’s a frustrated newsman in a company that’s all about luxury. Even though his past and his friendships with artists like Braque and Picasso are so fascinating to me, he doesn’t want to talk about it. I’d love to hear about his and Tatiana’s flight from the Nazis that brought him to New York, but he won’t go there. He’s just as fascinated by what’s happening on page one of the New York Post, which he loves for its tabloid energy. I also feel the magazines for him are really just a game, that his real interests are with his own work. Moving the Condé Nast chess pieces around is just a way to limber up his strategic skills before going back to drill away at huge slabs of rock, or hurl paint at a canvas in his studio.

  In the evening Ed Epstein took me to a party at the great magazine editor Clay Felker’s apartment, where he lives with the writer Gail Sheehy. Huge thrill because I am obsessed with Clay as an editor of genius. His New York magazine was so alive, so audacious. It defined the seventies and invented so many writers, from Gloria Steinem to Tom Wolfe. When I was living in New York for the three months after Oxford I became addicted to it. It created a longing in my stomach to see the next issue and race to the newsstand when it came out.

  Clay has very pale, watchful eyes, thin, sandy-blond hair, and a certain ruthless disregard until you say something that interests him and provokes a barrage of questions. Gail is a vivacious redhead with a torrent of ideas. Everyone at the party was so famous but unfortunately I had never heard of them. I said to Shirley MacLaine, “What do you do?” She gave me a manic, hostile stare and went on talking to Ed Epstein about how he should research a book about flying saucers. I couldn’t believe, once it was pointed out who he was, the excessive copiousness of Kurt Vonnegut’s hair, or the extreme pushiness of his photographer wife, Jill Krementz. I felt I would scream if I heard about another book in progress or a new TV show someone’s writing.

  I hadn’t seen Clay in four years, when I first met him with Harry and he still had New York mag. Now the best editor in America doesn’t have a magazine. He, too, ran into a buzz saw called Rupert Murdoch. I could sense his unhappy restlessness. How much he yearns to have his vehicle back to tell stories. Every observation he made about media, people, what was happening in the room was a great feature idea. I was happy that he said Tatler was the best mag he had seen in a decade. “You must write now, about all this.” He gestured around the room. The natural editor. Still recruiting. If he was running a magazine now I would work for him in a heartbeat!

  Saturday, June 11, 1983

  Awful day. Leo, after ostentatiously being fond of me before my lunch with Alex and in front of Si, was back to cutting me out again and ignoring my suggestions. It’s unfair and ridiculous. I am just trying to get better pieces for him. I went out to drink with Trey Speegle, a smart Texan designer in the art department. We talked about VF and what it needed and I think he’s very much on my wavelength. Nick Dunne came in and I took him to La Goulue as it was my turn to conduct a romance. I like him so much. He talked about his successive stages of grief, guilt and rage and the feeling of suspended time as he sat beside his daughter’s life
-support system day after day. But he also talked about the grotesque humor that strikes in the middle of tragedy, how the priest had double-booked his daughter’s funeral with a wedding and all the celebrity mourners of Dominique had to wait around outside while confetti was thrown as the honeymoon couple left. And how his sister-in-law, Joan Didion, was closing a piece for The New York Review of Books and wouldn’t get off the phone when they needed to communicate with the cops. He seems to me such a natural writer. You can teach people structure and how to write a lead. But you can’t teach them how to notice the right things. I just hope he gets it on the page, or we can interview it out of him. We walked out of La Goulue into dazzling summer sunshine and walked up Madison Avenue, he to his shrink, me to the Surrey hotel. On the way we ran into Andy Warhol and Baby Jane Holzer, who hailed Nick. Both these legends looked utterly bleached out. Like negatives walking side by side along the street. Nick and I then stopped at Books and Company and browsed the seductive, shiny new book table. It was such a perfect afternoon.

  In the evening I went out to dinner with Willie Hamilton and we laughed about that Leo evening. He took me to a party on the roof of what seemed to be the very edge of Manhattan, with a ladder leading to another asbestos roof where you could look out at New Jersey and the lonely beauty of the Statue of Liberty. It was so breathtaking. The host was a trendy glassblower or something, with a Japanese wife. All the men had the new Edward Steichen chiseled look of slicked-back hair and wide trousers. There was a very superior architect who had been at a recent dinner with a lot of other architects at Si Newhouse’s house, where he and Victoria had shown The Fountainhead, which he seemed to think was very gauche. Then of course the talk turned to VF and he said,“I told Si he should model it on Tatler,” and said all his friends in the advertising world think Leo will bury it.

  I couldn’t sleep all night. Here I am about to slink back to England, leaving VF to its doom. Maybe I should think again.

  Saturday, June 25, 1983

  It’s so hot. Everyone seems to have a place to go on the weekends. I wish someone would invite me! I miss Harry so much and think longingly of the garden at Brasted and the cool walk through the woods behind.

  Leo doesn’t ask me to features meetings or if he does, he rejects everything I suggest. Doesn’t he understand I could save his job? I feel I am really wasting my time here and have to cut my losses.

  I am supposed to be seeing Alex next week before I leave New York, but it seems wise to go and see Si and tell him I can’t be a consultant or any part of this magazine as it is. I either have to edit it or split. I feel I have to say this to Si directly because you can never tell with Alex how the message will be relayed. After all, he is implicated in the disaster that it is.

  I realize I blew it last time when they came to me to recruit me after Locke, but I wasn’t ready then, and now I am. I’m not afraid of it anymore. I know I could do a better job than anything I am seeing coming out of that art room. It’s time to be ballsy or forget about it.

  Si met me at the elevators on the fourteenth floor, looking even more rumpled and perplexed than usual. In his unadorned office there’s a wire paperback rack such as one sees at airports, full of books from the imprints he owns—Random House, Crown, Knopf. On the floor were a row of Condé Nast magazines as if he had been staring at them to see which one of them to keep. He drew up a chair next to me, my side of the desk. I was so nervous. But I took a deep breath and told him that when my consultancy is up next week I don’t want any further arrangement with Vanity Fair. He frowned with concern and asked why. I said I believed it was on the wrong track, and didn’t want to be associated with it. I said Leo had done a great job of hiring people but leadership must come from the top and he can’t provide it. I said VF needs a dramatic change of direction to revive it. And readers are going to be disappointed with what they see.

  His lower lip jutted further than usual. “I am very concerned by what you say,” he said. “Alex and I don’t want old ideas served up in an old way.”

  “That’s what you are going to get,” I said mulishly.

  “Isn’t there any way we can ease the collaboration?” he said. “So that you and Leo—”

  “No,” I replied.

  “But the timing”—he faltered—“Leo has just become editor. He needs time.”

  “The magazine can no longer afford that time,” I said. “The only thing I can do for you when you are ready is be the editor.”

  He looked exasperated, as well he might. “But, Tina, you never seemed interested in editing it when we talked to you.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said. “But I don’t want to see it fail.”

  I felt this was a very serious moment from which there would be no turning back.

  “I will do a good, jazzy job for you, Si, if you want me,” I said, looking at him very directly now.

  He shifted around in his chair. “This is, this is—where will you be? Here or in London?”

  “London,” I said, adding, “I am seeing Alex on Monday. And will tell him all this.”

  More shifting around. “Well, I’m, I’m glad you are seeing Alex. If you write a book, maybe Random House…”

  I rose and we shook hands, with him still looking puzzled.

  I felt elated when I walked out of there. I feel I recouped all the loss in pride I have experienced hanging around waiting for Leo to be in a good mood while he fucks it all up.

  I went back down to my desk and responded coolly when Leo asked me to step in. He sensed something was up because he immediately said, “Let’s now discuss all you will do for us when you are back in London.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” I said. “My consultancy ends here.”

  “But aren’t you coming back and forth?”

  “No.”

  “So no international editor?” he said with a sly smile.

  “That’s right.”

  “So who am I going to ask when I need all those wonderful British writers you brought in?”

  “Try British Vogue,” I said. He looked uneasy and I was about to feel sorry for him, but then I saw the glint in his eye and realized he was gloating. He feels he has won, for now.

  Saturday, July 23, 1983

  Today I was summoned to Alex’s house in Connecticut, rather than wait to see him in the office on Monday. In readiness for the meeting I paged through Barbara Rose’s biography of him as an artist and was impressed. It’s fashionable in art circles to call Alex a lightweight, but whether you like the colorful abstract canvases or not, he’s clearly a serious talent, possessed of an intellectual vigor that would make him worthy of consideration without any of his social or publishing connections. At ten o’clock this morning a limo from Berkshire Livery slid up to the Surrey hotel to drive me out to the Liberman retreat at Warren. Everything worked wonderfully, including the summer downpour. It cut out the possibility of such social decoys as “Tatiana will be happy to lend you a swimsuit.” Si would, I know, have told Alex that I had been to see him and meant business. I realized I had to make clear to Alex that Leo can’t edit the magazine because he doesn’t have any point of view about what it ought to be. I would soft-pedal that though in favor of the less subjective fact that even if he is doing a good job, the perception is so bad in the advertising community that it doesn’t matter. As Marie Brenner’s husband, Jonathan Schwartz, put it, “People have one thing to say about Vanity Fair. Toilet.”

  Armed with this determination, I felt self-confident and free. I dressed very English in a long-sleeved navy silk Saint Laurent shirt with a white collar and a navy skirt with oyster stockings and low-heeled pumps. I was going to drop the flirtatious charm of La Grenouille, however, and become, as Gloria Steinem put it so well, the man you want to marry.

  When I pulled up to the house I was floored at first by how beautiful it is. Clean, classic white clapboard brimming with geraniums, glorious piles of books everywhere, and bronzes lurking among lush ferns and plants. Alex was dress
ed off-duty but looked as stylish as ever in a check shirt and old workman pants, his manner cordial but with a small undertow of irritation. I think if I had waffled about being unsure again he would have dispatched me back on the three-hour drive without any lunch. But he sat me down on the sofa and I pitched right in. He was immediately engaged, direct and real without all the courtly affect of the city. I felt the pleasure of a muscular mind talking to me as a peer, on a serious professional footing, instead of with urbane condescension to a skittish girl.

  I told him everything I believed. That VF would be down the drain by the end of the year if it kept going like this. That I had come to New York with the belief that Leo could, with help, be the right appointment, but now I realized he was an impediment to its success because he cannot think conceptually. He is afraid of team spirit because he is threatened by anyone good. And finally, he can never produce a magazine that is anything more than received opinion. “It should be a sound, not an echo,” I said a bit loftily. Alex smiled.