by Tina Brown
Harry urged me to go see Pam Van Zandt, as political situations can escalate and turn nasty. Thank God I did. I discovered that both Alex and Linda had also requested appointments with her. I love going to see PVZ. If I was a corporate manager I would model myself on her—the cool eyes, pale hair, soft dresses, and attentive calm behind her clean desk. I told her about Linda and she immediately agreed that I should now get my own editorial production and management executive and she had thoughts already of whom we could attract. Then she asked how it was going generally. “The great treat,” I said, knowing she was seeing him later and also because it was true, “is the joy of working with Alex. I am learning so much. I find him extraordinary.” She looked astonished, as she is so used to the tension between editors and Alex. Then she flipped open her talent binder and we focused on whom we could hire.
Later, when Alex came down to see me after his meeting with her, he was back to his old warmth. “I love your sensibility, my dear,” he said. “The magazine is going to be a triumph and it is all you.” Now, thank God, Linda is back in her box, and she told PVZ she is “crazy about me” and that I resemble Vreeland in the sixties, but I am not going to be persuaded. I told PVZ I am nonnegotiable about wanting her removal. There will be other speed bumps and Linda has proven that she will run to Alex when there are problems.
The mock-up of the new front-of-book section, Vanities, is looking great. In fact Alex is right, now that I see pages pasted in the dummy, the mag is starting to be transformed. Helmut Newton’s pictures of the Hollywood blondes are so strong and sexy. I am splashing the mermaid starlet Daryl Hannah on the cover, wearing a black blindfold, with the arch cover line Blonde Ambition. She’s holding an Oscar statuette in each hand like a glitzy version of blind justice, which adds another level of double entendre as the fate of the mag weighs in the balance. Nick Dunne’s piece is delicious candy. He brings Chandlerish texture by throwing movie backlight on the actresses. “There is a mythology of the great blonde movie stars, and I happen to enjoy it. I thrill to the lore that Louis B. Mayer, the most powerful man in Hollywood, destroyed the suicide note of Paul Bern to protect MGM’s investment in Jean Harlow. I still want to believe that Lana Turner was discovered at the soda fountain of Schwab’s drug store on the Sunset Strip.” Then we have Annie’s fantastic pictures of Keith Richards and Patti Hansen with Philip Norman’s juicy book extract about Keith, and the glorious Lartigue portfolio. It lacks hard reporting, but no time to achieve it for the first issue.
Friday morning was the big day when I had my first “print order meeting” with all the Condé Nast brass. It takes place upstairs on the management floor, and the circulation director assesses the sales potential of the impending issue. I stood at a lectern in the top-floor conference room as all the suits filed in. I was full of excitement until I saw that Leo was one of them. He glowered at me all the way through and threw me off completely, so I didn’t present well. Si, who I haven’t seen in a month, sat there in his sweatshirt looking, as always, deceptively sleepy. But at the end of the meeting Peter Armour, the circulation director, at the end of the table announced like an auctioneer, “My recommendation is to increase the newsstand order of the April 1984 issue by twenty-five thousand.” They all filed out. Si stayed and sat next to me. He flicked through the April dummy hesitantly, pausing at certain spreads. “It’s full of life,” is all he would say. Who knows what the public reaction will be?
Sunday, February 12, 1984
Deadline upon us. Friday evening we put the last-minute headlines and blurbs on before the April issue closes. Tracy and I sat in my office and banged out the blurbs on the Vanities section. Tracy wrote the blurb on the opening page—“Stepping out, stepping up, stepping on toes, Vanity Fair laughs up its sleeve.”
“How about laughs up its ravell’d sleeve?” I said, and we fell about laughing at this arf-arf Macbeth allusion (“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care”) and rushed to read it out to the group of editors celebrating Wayne’s birthday in his cubicle. When I said “ravell’d,” Wayne fell about laughing, too. But we are probably all just literary snobs who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of our inside jokes. Charles Churchward, whose instincts I always trust, said he didn’t know what the fuck ravell’d meant and nor would anyone else.
I took the mock-up of the Helmut Newton cover pic of Hannah in the black blindfold pasted onto a dummy copy of a magazine down to the newsstand in the lobby and stuck it next to the garish lineup of its competitors. People rushing out of the building at five kept staring at me hovering around the rack and pacing back and forth. Hmmn. Am I right to use the pic that covers her eyes? It goes against all newsstand rules of needing eye contact with the reader. On the other hand, its racy S and M flair announces a risqué new day for Vanity Fair. After five minutes of obsessing at the rack, I decide to go with it.
* * *
Now am in the nerve-racking limbo between going to press and coming out mid-March and already into the crash of the May issue without knowing how the revamp will be received and being able to adjust mistakes. I am decided on hiring John Walsh as my features ed. David Halberstam and Jonathan Schwartz warned me off him, but Bradlee, Bill Broyles, and Felker all raved, and those are good recommenders. Plus, just when I was dithering, he wrote me a really smart memo. My stock shot up in the office when he came in, maybe because his snow-white beard and white eyelashes made them briefly think I’d hired Ernest Hemingway. He started bombarding me with ideas as soon as the contract was papered, his suggestions punctured by wild baboon-like giggles that betray a promising strand of irresponsibility. “I’m on the case,” is his catchphrase. One of the cases he’s on, however, is Tracy Young’s, who he keeps insisting everyone tells him is bad news. “I hear she’s a badmouth and her Rolodex doesn’t go above Thirteenth Street,” he told me late at night on the phone.
Tuesday, February 14, 1984
We all wait nervously for reaction. For distraction, I felt like dressing up. With nothing more I could do to the April issue as it prints, I put on a long black velvet Bruce Oldfield dress and pearl choker and went off to the New Yorkers for New York gala at the Waldorf. I was seated next to the famous magazine writer Gay Talese, who has a weary, worldly face.
“Find me a better magazine writer in this new generation than I am. That’s all!” he barked. He launched into an encomium about Harold Hayes, the legendary Esquire ed who is still around, he says. “I’d write for you if you had Hayes,” he said. “We all would.”
Steve Brill, the ed of the monthly mag American Lawyer, which I adore for its clean, wide format and investigative muscle, and Clay Felker were at the next table. Clay and Gail have invited us to dinner, just the four of us at his apartment on Monday. But now Clay said, “My cook’s gone to Argentina so we have to go out, and Kay Graham is joining us.” Clearly he’s dreaming of Kay’s money already, but she will string him along and not give him a cent. Gay said to me, “I think you’ll make it at Vanity Fair. You step into two fuckups before you, with no past. Whatever mistakes and prejudices you’ve accumulated in England, you’re a fresh face here. You’ll do it.” Handicapping my success or failure, it seems, is an irritating New York game.
Sunday, February 19, 1984
Monday is President’s Day and Harry is in Chicago. I took myself off to the Don CeSar hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida. I first sighted its pretentious pink porticos rising out of the best beach in Florida on a boat trip with Harry once and have dreamed of it ever since. It’s got everything I currently want: a limitless white beach to walk on, total anonymity, a hot whirlpool massage, and a great big warm swimming pool. I had such a pulverizing last three days in the city before I left that I wondered, hurling my white pants and swimsuit into a bag, whether I could bear the journey. My other bag contained the manuscript of Norman Mailer’s new book that just arrived for possible serial, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and a box file full of submitted pieces. I got into St. Pete at one a.m. yesterday and saw how worthwhile the e
ffort was immediately. I have been rattled by office politics. It seems that John Walsh is right and Tracy is getting into a disaffected corner with the production ed, Linda Rice, creating vibes I don’t like.
I lay in the sun all day and fell into a doze replete with warmth and Caesar salad. I read an odd, brilliant manuscript by a writer Alex knows, Gregor von Rezzori, who wrote Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. He has a haunting voice and I definitely want him in the mag. His lofty, émigré style is reminiscent of Nabokov. I am going to ask him to reproduce Humbert Humbert’s drive across America for us for a summer issue.
Monday, March 5, 1984
Got back from Florida refreshed and fired Linda Rice. Gotta clean house. A few days away made me determined to remove negative elements from the office. I made sure I had Si’s support for it first. I asked to go up to see him. He looked nervous when I walked in, as he always is when he is not sure what it’s about. I said, “Si, is there some kind of corporate problem about uh, letting go Linda Rice?”
“Problem?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “There seems to be a miasma of embarrassment hanging over the subject of her employment.”
“If you need to fire Linda, fire Linda,” Si said, looking amused. (Hang on, I thought we said “letting go” around here.) “Do you have a problem with firing people, Tina? I wouldn’t have thought you did.”
“No,” I replied. “And I feel I should start firing a few who are making problems.”
“All at once or one by one?” I felt he was teasing me now.
“I will let you know,” I said.
I immediately went downstairs and kissed good-bye to Locke’s golden girl Moira Hodgson. She writes well but her resentful politesse has been getting on my nerves.
Tuesday, March 6, 1984
Michael Roberts is suddenly on his former fashion star form. We agreed we should start his fashion pages with a bang, and he has delivered brilliant Olympic Games–themed pictures for May. I love seeing him in the art department pondering the spreads with his cigarette aloft, like an elegant camel. He has stealthily begun to glitz up the dowdy atmosphere in the office with his multicolored dress rails hung with designer “frocks,” bangles, stiletto shoes, and the inevitable signature wrappers of half-eaten chocolate bars. Yesterday morning a jabbering Greek lady burst into the art department, pointing at Michael. It turned out she was the overnight cleaner whom Michael, by mistake, had locked in the fashion closet all night.
My new friend and hopefully contributor to VF is the marvelously funny and intellectually exuberant Australian art critic from Time, Robert Hughes. He did the famous BBC TV show The Shock of the New and has a robust iconoclasm that’s been missing from my life since London. We had a riotous lunch in the Four Seasons with Bob getting drunker and drunker. He said New York for him would never be by the sea. “Who was the architect who built that great French letter of concrete around it all?” he roared, and relished my descriptions of Locke-land that had preceded me. “Only the Brits can think the right level of malignant thoughts a magazine requires, and provide an antidote to all the upbeat American gush.” At the end of our lunch Alex and Si came over from their table, Alex, at his most foxy, to see Bob as he is so important to his artist world. Si asked Bob what he thought of the new Jasper Johns show. Bob promptly poured rivers of eloquent scorn on Johns, not caring, it seemed, that Si has spent a great part of his fortune on buying his paintings. When Alex drew Bob aside, Si turned to me and said, “Do you know an English author called Kenneth Rice? He’s just written a book about George V.” (He meant Kenneth Rose.) “It’s really very good.”
“Why is it good?” I asked. Si looked startled by my question.
“Well … George V was really a very dull man, but this book makes him seem interesting.”
Wednesday, March 7, 1984
Still waiting for the April issue. America is so enormous it takes a week for the trucks to rumble across the country distributing it. At night I sometimes think of them speeding along ribbons of open highway with all our energy and hopes on the back. I had a great evening with Annie Leibovitz, who came over with Ruth. She told me some of the stories of the wild days at Rolling Stone. It turns out Annie has an apartment in the same building as me, though hers is on the thirty-ninth floor so she has the glorious astronaut’s view, and of course it isn’t stuffed with all the paraphernalia of Mrs. de Voff’s humming electronic brothel that I currently live in. The other night Harry opened a closet door in the bathroom and a cascade of porn magazines rained down.
Annie is such an Amazon. Tall, funny with a big brash laugh, but also so highly strung that her nerve endings are at the tips of her fingers. She’s off drugs now and said, “I love living here and being alone. I’m learning to live with myself.” She told me she leaves the windows open so the wind rushes in and freezes her all night. When she talks about her work, she is so intense, her eyes go serious and driven behind her oversized aviator glasses. She wants to do her best work ever for VF and she will. I recognize her demons and salute them. We are going to have a wonderful time.
Sunday, March 11, 1984
Apt. 2A, 120 Central Park South
I have moved! The de Voff apartment got too much to bear. I began to feel I would open the fridge door and find frilly lingerie and cuckoo clocks. Condé Nast found me this pristine two-bedroom rental, and I am so happy to escape. You can see the horses and carriages through the big picture window overlooking the park. The parquet floor is made to dance on. It is clean and stark and yet cozy. I am blissfully happy to be here and can’t wait to show Harry when he’s next in from Duke.
Mum and Dad arrived to stay with me. Mum found NYC absolutely thrilling and understood for the first time why I must be here, in the center of the world. Dad seems preposterously British in New York but wonderfully solid to lean on. Apparently some man outside Bloomie’s accosted him with “Wally! I haven’t seen you since we both worked at the deli!” On seeing Dad’s furious colonial mustache bristling at him, he backed off. While I was at work they kitted out the new apartment for me, trailing around department stores and returning with giant parcels of sheets and towels and cutlery. Mum said that when they adjourned with the parcels to a diner for lunch, Dad ordered broiled flounder and a cup of tea. It was so lovely to sit up with her while Dad was asleep, cackling over stories from Spain like the old days.
Had a terrific drink tonight with Tom Wolfe, who is tall and thin like a candle in his white suit, with a dryness suddenly illuminated by joyous shafts of pure malice. Was hoping to have the mag to show him but still no copy. I told him I was having dinner with Martin Amis. “Ah, the rising novelist of thirty-four? Funny how you are a hardened thief at thirty but a rising novelist at thirty-four.” Outside it was pouring rain and we lingered over our drink at Le Périgord. He told me he is finishing his new novel about New York and the “masters of the universe” of Wall Street. “Isn’t it going to run over twelve months in Rolling Stone?” I asked. “That’s the reigning myth,” he said. [The Bonfire of the Vanities did run there.] He liked the idea I have of a column for VF called Reputations.
“I could write about a living author posthumously,” he said, with sparkling eyes. “Bernard Malamud, for instance.” I enjoyed myself so much I was twenty minutes late for Martin, whom I’d arranged to meet at the mafioso-style bar in the theater district, Barbetta. When I got there, Martin had gone, piqued to be kept waiting. But I finally got hold of him at his hotel and we had dinner. I hadn’t had a conversation with him for two and a half years. He has become graver and more ironically severe than ever. Remembering the old rules of London about “not trying too hard,” I tried at first to modify my liberated Manhattan directness, then thought fuck it, why should I? Still, after a glass of wine, Martin is as funny as ever. He said he ultimately hates New York because of the “unembarrassable” ads and the fact that “you’re not allowed to think anyone’s odd.” We dissolved into competing impersonations of Al Pacino in Scarface. “FOCK YOU. Don’
t FOCK with me. Are you a man with BOLS, huh? See my BOLS? Don’t FOCK with me!” Many puzzled looks around us as we repeated this over and over again with screams of laughter that were like old times.
Monday, March 12, 1984
The early copy of my April issue arrived! I see only the flaws but it’s pretty great. Fresh, racy, a lot of literary spark. Needs some “bottom,” as my father would say, but it’s a vast improvement, especially in design. The front-of-book section is sprightly but a bit brittle in tone. The pagination leap from Keith Richards to the Gainsborough painting is great pacing. Love the Daryl Hannah cover. Fret over the lack of news grit but must be patient. It’s very, very different from its portentous predecessor and I hope is not rejected. Its major success is the successful uniformity of tone.
Miles has arrived for good! PVZ has installed him at a hotel on Madison and Fifty-Second while he looks for an apartment. He said it’s full of overweight Irish girls wearing T shirts saying IRA FREEDOM FIGHTER but that must be because of St. Patrick’s day coming up. His arrival was good timing. Tonight I invited the whole staff around to the apartment for a housewarming drink and a toast to the issue. It was wonderful for morale, especially as Si came, too, which made everyone feel he believed in VF. I had framed some Japanese rock-and-roll illustrations we are running in the mag and hung them that morning, and they had pride of place on the sitting room wall in the otherwise pictureless apartment. I felt so happy. The brand-new clean-of-clutter apartment, the snow in Central Park, the feeling of affectionate bonds between the finally gelling staff, the issue out but not yet seen and critiqued. I asked the contributing eds, too—Wolcott, whom I now like enormously, and Schiff, who is still the biggest kindred spirit. We have promoted Wayne to executive ed so I can bring in Pamela McCarthy from Esquire to be the managing editor. As soon as she walked in for the interview I knew this was who I wanted. She’s a Taurus to her toes. Calm, smooth, organized, experienced. A sense of humor. Exudes good judgment. Felker recommended her and I am beyond grateful. The perfect foil to my own Scorpio volatility. I felt my stomach unclench when I realized how much she will help my whirling dervishness and get control of all the moving parts.