The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  * * *

  Now H and I are getting some peace while it lasts. The cicadas are whirring, there is a fruit punch beside me, and I am lolling on a beach bed while Harry swims his thousand and one lengths in the pool. I have just read a bad novel by Gore Vidal, but it’s hard to concentrate. I know this is a short respite before I leave Harry, get on the plane to New York, and find out if my life is going to change forever.

  Thursday, December 15, 1983

  Arrived in New York yesterday ready for—and steeled against—another exhausting round of finessing and compromise from Alex and Si.

  The day started very early, waking up at the Algonquin Hotel feeling extremely nervous. It seemed the right place to stay for such an important literary mission. I had arranged a breakfast meeting with a lawyer, John Breglio, recommended by Harry’s friend Bob Yoakum. I had hoped for an intimidating macho man, but perhaps his low-key style is better for Condé Nast. He did give me one piece of very good advice. Which was not to be fazed by ambiguity, but to be as direct as possible. And turn any questions back at them. If for instance they again ask me what I think of Leo, I should parry with, “What do YOU think of Leo?” and “What are YOUR plans for the editorship?”

  Thus armed, I set off an hour early for Si’s town house on East Seventieth Street, determined to beat the Christmas traffic and relax over a coffee in a nearby diner. I picked up an outfit at Bergdorf this morning—a black Chloé dress with wide shoulders and high heels, but it suddenly felt as if it reeked too much of “interview” uniform, when Si is always so casual. Instead I wore the outfit I flew out to Barbados in, an old Lady Di–like ensemble I bought in a shop in Windsor, a calf-length navy tartan skirt, long boots, and a navy sweater with a deep V in the back that now displays Barbados tan. I hoped I was looking breezily English, rather than quietly hysterical.

  Thus disguised, I pressed the doorbell of a pale gray concrete facade that looked like a cross between a museum and a modern church. A security guard lurked outside. The door was opened by a black housekeeper. Inside, the overall impression I got was art gallery. Everything seemed to be in hallowed beige and the walls displayed iconic abstract art I have seen on Museum of Modern Art postcards. Some I recognized as Alex’s. I was sent upstairs to the library, where I could hear voices. It was Si and Alex, already characteristically together and early. I looked first at Si, who appeared genial and refreshed. Gone was the protruding lip and furrowed brow of the hot summer day when I told him I couldn’t work for Leo. No, Si was in happy chipmunk mode, with brushed hair, tanned face, and even a tie—bright blue. I hoped I was responsible for this new aura of humor and hope. That morning I had just read in The New York Times that Random House’s book on Barbara Hutton, extracted in VF, had been withdrawn for being almost entirely fallacious. And it’s only two months since the billion-dollar Newhouse tax case hit the paper. But he showed no sign of angst about these. I have come to realize that when you are worth as much as he is, there is no such thing as bad news, except, perhaps, losing it all.

  Then I looked at Alex. I have spent so much time plumbing his mental processes that I am almost fond of him. He looked a little frailer, but courtly as always. Si got me a Coke from the bar and we sat down for small talk. My mental bravado about how self-confident I would be now evaporated and I felt both shy and stilted. Alex made the conversation work by telling me how delightful my “compatriot” Michael Roberts is. “You remember his parody of Diana Vreeland, Si? He has done something about the Queen with a look-alike. Quite frankly, I think it is a hoot!” “Don’t talk to me about fakes,” said Si, perched on a square stool like a happy elf. “Have you read about the Barbara Hutton stuff? What they don’t say about it is that the bits that weren’t wrong were plagiarized!” He laughed his little spluttery laugh. I was intrigued, as I always am by the workings of this curious Condé Nast game, that Alex and he hadn’t discussed the Hutton business before. A silence fell. I asked Si if he had ever had to withdraw a book before. “Only a cookbook some years ago,” he said. “In one of the recipes it forgot to say that the can of condensed milk should be opened before it was put in the saucepan and it exploded all over some poor woman’s kitchen!” He laughed so helplessly that his eyes watered and he went pink and suggested we all go down to the dining room. Alex gave his small, tight smile.

  In the dining room there was more art dominating all the walls. And a table exquisitely set with Mexican silver plates. Alex looked around at all the colorful abstract blobs. “How charming!” he said. “Is this Victoria’s handiwork? I see Christmas everywhere!”

  “Yes, the angels were Victoria’s idea,” said Si, although I couldn’t see any angels in the whirling splashes and circles around us. The housekeeper served us with a delicious savory and another silence fell. I glanced sideways at Alex, who was looking at his plate with his thin profile to me, inscrutable. Clearly determined to let Si take the lead.

  “Well, Tina,” Si said at last. “I hope you don’t feel Vanity Fair’s prospects are as hopeless as you told Women’s Wear Daily recently?”

  Shit! I forgot about that piece. “I haven’t seen that,” I said. “I hope—”

  “It was a full page,” said Alex. “A very nice piece apart from those comments.”

  Si laughed. “Yes, you said it had no future. Is that your opinion?”

  “Is it yours?” I said, remembering John Breglio’s advice.

  “Well,” said Si, “I can only speak from the business standpoint. At the beginning there was a great deal of interest. A great deal. Then we had problems. Then Leo came in and I think he has silenced the magazine’s intellectual critics, but then these are probably not the magazine’s constituency anyway. We’ve put in a new publisher, David O’Brasky, who was responsible for the business success of New York magazine, and I think he will sell more advertising. But…” He trailed off.

  “And editorially?” I said. He deferred to Alex, who wiped his mustache with a dab and looked at me, asking me to speak. I ignored Breglio’s advice this time. “I think the magazine has failed to find its identity,” I said, aware of how amorphous this sounded. “I think there is good stuff in it, but it isn’t breaking through. And what’s more, I think at this stage its incremental improvements can’t win back interest and excitement.” To soften the notion that the editor and by inference Alex, too, had failed, I added, “I think it’s almost irrelevant now what’s IN the magazine unless the PERCEPTION of the magazine can be changed.” Si was nodding through the second half of this. Alex spoke at last. “Unfortunately,” he said, “Vanity Fair has lacked the necessary leadership from the beginning.”

  “Clearly,” I said boldly. “I think I could make a difference to that.”

  There was another pause. I pushed it further and looked at Alex.

  “What do you have in mind?” I said.

  “You,” he replied, gazing at me full-on.

  Bull’s-eye! They were offering me the job! I stared back at him. It had been such a long, agonized slow dance, I now felt light-headed.

  “What would be helpful,” said Si, suddenly leaping to the details, “is if you could spend a few months working with Leo to save his face.” From this moment everything sped up. I never had the chance to say “I accept.” All was now business.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “I could take three or four members of staff and work ahead on another floor.”

  “That wouldn’t work,” said Alex, always practical once decisions had been made. “I fear, Si, we will have to bite the bullet. Leo has created a void around himself. He won’t listen to anyone.” (Except Alex!) “He is so paranoid that all the people he hires are left to do nothing because he must do it all. He will be too bitter and make it impossible for Tina to be effective.”

  “That’s a pity,” said Si. “Isn’t there any way?”

  “I had one idea,” I said. “Editor emeritus.”

  Si started to laugh. “I can’t live with that,” he said. “An editor emeritus who’s only been
there for seven months! What about some kind of literary editor?”

  “No, Si,” said Alex. “Leo will be commissioning things and making commitments Tina will be stuck with.” (Amazing now that he had switched sides how pragmatic and helpful he had become.)

  “Well, we have to come up with something,” said Si. “We can’t have Leo diving out of there exuding malice. This move will cause reverberations in worlds where the magazine wants to retain links. Could he be some kind of consultant to Vanity Fair?”

  “Or the whole group!” said Alex on the wings of a new brain wave.

  “That’s good,” said Si. “Leo Lerman, who we borrowed from Vogue, is now going back to—”

  “The company as a whole!” said Alex quickly, perhaps suddenly seeing Leo stomping into Vogue, where he has just brought in Anna Wintour as number two in the role of creative director (from where she will likely succeed Grace as editor), and is already feeling new blood livening things up. Anna, for sure, would show Leo the door.

  “Put his name under mine on the corporate masthead!” said Alex, adding with a burst of faux generosity, “Put his name OVER mine on the masthead if you wish! Why should we be petty at this point?”

  “I would be very happy to consult Leo,” I said. “And with his flair for houses and food I am sure House and Garden and Gourmet…”

  Now we all felt happy. “I’ll pay Leo’s salary for the rest of his life and give him two trips a year to Europe,” Si said.

  The two of them looked at each other.

  “We’ll have to talk to Leo,” Si said.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Alex, laughing rustily.

  “I am not looking at you,” said Si. “I will do it when I get back from my vacation on January first.”

  Alex dabbed at his mustache again, put down his napkin, and looked at me with his mouth a tight O of sophisticated amusement.

  “He wanted YOU to travel if I remember,” he said to me.

  “International editor?”

  Si laughed again and shook his head.

  “I take your word for it that Leo wouldn’t have you around,” he said, “but it’s funny that someone you see at a social level who seems so benign should be so … difficult professionally.”

  “He made mincemeat of me in the summer,” I said, starting to relax. “He saw me off.”

  “This frail old man,” Si repeated wonderingly. I glanced at Alex and saw him flinch a bit. He is in his midseventies. Here’s another reason why he now wants Leo out. Leo is giving old age a bad name around Condé Nast. To be so extravagantly unfit is an eyesore in Alex’s clean-desk world. His own hospital tests are enough of an intimation of mortality without Leo hobbling around. He said, “Linda Rice, our marvelous production lady who adores Leo, even she said to me, Alex, it is not possible. He cannot see the mini layouts on the board! It takes so long to unpin everything constantly!”

  Poor Leo. This was an upsetting story. I couldn’t do this if he’d been nicer to me in the summer. Still, I want it done elegantly and will try to recover the friendship.

  By two thirty it was all over. Si raised the issue of salary. “I feel comfortable with a hundred and thirty thousand dollars,” he said, but fell agonizingly silent when I said I wanted a two-year contract.

  “We don’t give ANY editors contracts,” he said at last. Alex sat there looking detached. The whole issue seemed to amuse them both. Perhaps for sinister, devious motives or because no one else has asked them for a contract or because they find me entertaining all around. I gracefully abandoned this with the determination to get Breglio to win the point for me. [Note: He did.] We arranged to meet for lunch on January 2. I shall begin as editor in chief on January 3. There will be no time to go back to London first. I will have to come straight from Barbados.

  Si picked up a tote bag full of books. “Can I give you a lift?” he said to me.

  “Should we be seen together?” said Alex, the automatic conspirator.

  “I will walk,” I said, and when Si left the room I embraced Alex, who suddenly seemed somewhat emotional. “Thank you,” I whispered, “for understanding that I couldn’t work with Leo.”

  “Impossible. Impossible, my dear,” he said. What is the old fox planning? To use me to hire a staff, turn VF around, and grab the credit? Perhaps because so much of his life as an émigré has been about improvisation I am learning he operates on a daily expediency basis more than a long-term plan. It would have been smarter really to announce Leo as moving into the consultant role, then announce me, but now that he’s going with the flow he just wants to see it happen.

  After the lunch I felt in a daze. I tried to call Harry in Barbados from a pay phone but couldn’t reach him. I have to break it to him that I won’t be going with him to Duke, but I can’t demur about the job again. I know he will want me to accept. I walked past the festive holiday windows to Books and Company on Madison Avenue but didn’t really see the new books that were stacked up on the table. I felt a crazy calm for the first time in many months, unwilling to let all the implications rush in: I will not be going back to London. I am moving to America. I am going to be editor in chief of Vanity Fair.

  1984

  ALL IN

  Tuesday, January 3, 1984

  I have arrived in New York from Barbados for the big announcement. Already I feel the joy of being taken over by a revving media machine. At ten a.m. Si Newhouse reached me in my room at the Algonquin to ask me to look at the draft of the press release. He had clearly written the announcement himself because it was endearingly amateurish—“So hats off to Leo for a job well done!”—with its explanation that Leo had requested a return to writing and general editing.

  I’m going to miss Harry horribly. Even though it means now he’ll be spending weeks at Duke without me, he’s thrilled I got the job. It’s as if he just snapped into Sunday Times editor mode and assigned me to the New York bureau. After emotional hugs he went home to rent out Ponsonby Terrace.

  When I got into New York yesterday afternoon, I raced over to Saks and bought a black Ted Lapidus suit and white shirt for the press shots (alternative was a pile of sarongs from Barbados or the tartan Lady Di number. The Chloe number I bought in December was just a mistake). Plus it’s freezing.

  Si in an old black sweater was very warm and welcoming, at the 350 Madison office, and Alex was avuncular, too. A cool-looking photographer was waiting in his office.

  “Not too much contrast,” Alex told him expertly as the photographer led me away to a view from a window on the top floor where I would be pictured looking alert for duty. I was then sent off to see Pam Van Zandt, the personnel director.

  I had expected “human resources,” as they call the job here, to be occupied by some plump homespun figure like we had in London. But PVZ, as she is known, is a streamlined blonde with a low, confidential voice and steely blue eyes that show their whites when she discusses “termination” procedures. (They say “letting go” here when they mean “sacked.”) She prepared me for the great unveiling with thrilling efficiency.

  My work visa? Step this way. I walked into a room where five lawyers were sitting around a table discussing my problem. One of them fired questions at me. The other fired solutions. A third whipped out forms that I had to sign for working papers. Insurance? Tax, savings plan? Limo account? Over here! I even got a free pass to a gym. It was like checking into a health spa. I expected to be handed a toweling robe and led quietly toward the scales. Best of all was PVZ coming up with an apartment for me to see on East Fifty-Second Street. It is currently being used by Italian Vogue, who are moving out at the end of January.

  Next was lunch with Alex at the Four Seasons. We talked about first steps with the magazine. I told him I wanted to get right away from Vogue’s look, and (since that’s his handiwork) I used the reasoning that because he had so little confidence in the VF material thus far he’s been forced to jazz it up with noisy typography, but now that the material will be strong it should have a cle
an, classical look.

  When Si came over from another table for coffee, I heard Alex say, “The problem with the art department is they have had so little confidence in the material they’ve had to jazz it up too much.” Si gave his industrious frown, registering perhaps his perplexity at Alex’s gifts for disassociation.

  Now I am back at the Algonquin, nursing the Secret. I haven’t told a soul in case it leaked. I was too exhausted to go out so I ordered a baked potato from room service and was blown away by the exorbitant price. The Algonquin’s literary legend is clearly a thing of the past. The famous wood-paneled Oak Room, where I once quaffed cranberry juice with S. J. Perelman and Harry on our honeymoon as a piano tinkled, was full of Japanese tourists with cameras.

  Thursday, January 5, 1984

  D Day. The news of my appointment clearly stunned the VF staff. They all knew Leo was on shaky ground but didn’t expect this change so fast, or that it would be me named in the job, as I have been out of sight for six months. I have had meetings with a parade of shell-shocked editors and staff writers to get to know them properly. Some, like Wayne, I knew already from the summer, but now the dynamic is different. Elizabeth Pochoda, who was a senior ed when I was there before, has already gone, which, even though she is smart, is a relief, as she was a part of the Locke lobby and it gives me space to hire someone else. Anthony Haden-Guest told me he will be leaving in a month for New York mag, perhaps sensing I was someone who would demand commitment. Most welcoming faces were the art department, Ruth Ansel and her deputy, Charles Churchward; relieved, I think, not to be torn anymore between the warring Alex and Leo. One great person I am glad is here is Bob Colacello, who’s very affable behind huge black-framed glasses. I could immediately see why he succeeded as editor of Interview. I liked every single idea he put up and understand now, too, why Alex has been considering him for GQ.

  It feels extremely strange to walk past the secretive staff cubicles to the editor in chief’s office at the end of the gangway and realize it’s now mine. It still has the Richard Locke penumbra of the dark oversized furniture and—a relic of Leo’s needs—its own loo, which I am not unhappy to inherit. In another Condé Nast magic-wand moment, an office designer arrived today and asked me how I wanted the space changed. I asked for a horseshoe desk, a round meeting table, a couch, and a wall of corkboards for covers.