by Tina Brown
Wednesday, July 18, 1984
Flight, flight! I’m on the plane back to London.
Maybe it was the hot madness of summer but the office was combustible. Feuds erupting in every corner. Flacks on the phone to me day and night railing about all our apparent misdemeanors with the pampered movie stars they represent. When he did his country house fashion shoot, Michael Roberts apparently had promised Tom Cruise a cover, which he’s not supposed to do without talking to me. Pat Kingsley, a raspy-voiced Hollywood PR fury from the influential PMK company, had just discovered that not only was Tom not on the cover but he’s dressed in a Sherlock Holmes cape in a fashion spread very much on the magazine’s inside in Michael’s spoof. “This has cost the movie company fifty thousand dollars a day,” she shrieked. “You’ve lost me a client! You’ll never get another cover star from PMK!”
“Let’s not get rash!” I screamed back. “I wouldn’t want you to take up an untenable posture.”
Her reply can only be characterized as $%&!@***.
Then Daphne Davis got into the mix. She spends all her time cozying up to the PRs on our behalf, so now she was at my elbow to vent her spleen against Michael because he always goes direct to the stars who like him and cuts out the PRs, which makes Daphne jealous and furious. “No one will work with Michael ever again,” she howled. “Everyone knows he’s a voyeur and a weirdo. I know Robert De Niro won’t work with him.”
“Let him refuse!” I flailed, longing only to get on the train to Quogue and pretend it’s 1910 in America. “This magazine doesn’t need Robert De Niro. Robert De Niro needs this magazine!”
“This is New York 1984! These PRs control everything now!”
“To hell with the PRs!” I screeched. “PRs are the scum of the earth!”
Daphne went yellow. “All PRs?”
“Well, some of them,” I conceded.
This scene took place just as I was leaving the office and sent my nerves jangling like skeletons in a house of horrors. Earlier in the week the excellent ed Peter Buckley had tried to resign over a redesign of the masthead he felt disadvantaged him; John Heilpern was calling from the Beverly Hills lounge every two hours in a frantic state about the apparent no-show of Jessica Lange for an interview; and just as we were struggling to get Nick Dunne’s piece into shape three days late, Si suddenly realized that by putting Paloma Picasso and her scent bottle on the cover, we were going to drive away every single other cosmetic advertiser. He demanded we pull the story and the cover. Holy moly! Alex was in Connecticut, Ruth was on Fire Island, and Michael was now in Hawaii shooting an extracurricular Levi’s ad. I had no problem pulling the story, which I never much liked, but had zero cover images as backup and was so pissed with Si’s late-in-the-hour fawning to advertisers. I considered making a fight of it but a Paloma scent bottle didn’t seem the issue to go to battle on. I finally found a compromise that Michael hated, of course, when I told him. A different picture of Paloma WITHOUT the scent bottle, elegant enough to stand but lacking the comedic style of the white butlered hands holding it up. Si let me put her on the cover with no reference to the perfume story, and Miles, Bob Colacello, and I spent three hours trying to glam up cover lines that would make the image less bland. “Plus! Martina’s muscles, Penn’s patent pump…”
“Horst’s hemorrhoids,” offered Bob. But then Miles came up with an inspired, completely meaningless cover line that I found thrilling even if no one understands what the fuck it means. “Sophisticated Boom-Boom!” he suggested. Hooray. Sophisticated Boom-Boom is what VF is all about, damn it. I took the issue up to Si and in case he tried to get me to remove the new cover line told him in a nonnegotiating voice that I had no idea what the line meant but I liked it. He just nodded gravely and said nothing. Then, “You should do a piece on Paloma’s sister. She’s not sophisticated at all. She’s a real peasant.”
But he pleased me by calling down later and telling me what “an impressive advertising picture September has.”
Mort is begging Harry to edit US News now that Harry’s ceased to be interested in it. Reverse bait-and-switch! Now that we have the house in Quogue, leaving at three p.m. on the train on Friday has become the thing we look forward to most in the world, so who needs commuting to DC? It’s such a wonderful summer ritual, setting off from Penn Station on the Long Island Rail Road, changing at Jamaica, and gazing out the window all the way to Westhampton. That lonely sound of the train’s honky warning as it rounds the bend. The ticket collector wears a boater and comes to each seat with sodas and chips. We always see the same people, editors and publishers with bags of manuscripts, spinsters with novels retreating to cottages in Sag Harbor.
I’ve had the mortgage accepted for Quogue as long as the lease is for at least fifteen years. Harry went to Boston to meet the mysterious Mr. Post at the St. Botolph Club. He owns all that stretch of Quogue beach land where we are. It was clear to H what Post wanted to know—were we acceptable, quiet WASP types rather than glitzy arrivistes who give wild beach parties? That’s why I wanted Harry to go alone, as I felt VF might sound way too fast-track. Harry wore his London Times air and knitted Savile Row tie and (I am sure) was at his most engaging. He didn’t give me enough of a picture of Post except that he’s tall and thin and flinty (and does have lots of kids). He got on well with him. Post offered to put together a package we could scrutinize and agreed, verbally anyway, to a twenty-four-year-and-up lease! We know it’s a great buy, even if it all turns sour in the end. That takes me to fifty-four and Harry to seventy-nine and by then, who knows, some other cash may have arrived.
I see America as a lucky dip. It’s crazy not to keep one’s eye on the prize all the time, it just keeps moving. Quogue is so much more than a house to us. It has spiritual meaning. We found it in the middle of the rainstorm, or it found us. It has a special atmosphere that will keep us sane. The station at Westhampton on Monday morning is full of wives dropping off sporty-looking guys in khaki chinos and blazers for their week back in the city. The kids hang around waiting to kiss their fathers good-bye. Why aren’t I that kind of wife? Looks pretty nice to me. Or does until I step off the train into the hot, hamburger breath of Penn Station in the city, the belly gasp of the striving week ahead after two days of sun and relaxation, and I feel my adrenaline spike. This is one of the best, best things about life in New York, these hell-for-leather contrasts!
Sunday, August 5, 1984
London! I fell in love with England all over again even though it was a crazy week finally doing the house things I put off for six months. The cats have been living at Brasted like the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, and clearly didn’t appreciate the moment of truth when I arranged to have them adopted by the window cleaner at his seaside bungalow. But we can’t put off renting it anymore. The new tenants are way more demanding than the cats. Their agent calls constantly and says, “Mr. and Mrs. Higgins feel the pelmets are dirty and the shower is not up to snuff.”
The strange thing about being back in London, though, is why we ever thought we needed Brasted to escape to. London is a country village where I keep running into friends. I had a lovely tea with Gabé Doppelt in Brown’s Hotel and caught up on all the Tatler gossip. I saw Pat Kavanagh having her highlights done at Michaeljohn. I went to Herbert Johnson’s and bought Dad a Panama hat that came in a bright red hat box for his birthday. I sashayed around Bond Street knowing exactly where I would get the classic silk shirts and jackets I love from Roland Klein, the new red heels from Katrina, my pearl earrings mended at David Morris. I went to see my new nephew at Chris and Diana’s house. The declivity in the back of Benjamin Brown’s head is just like Chris and Dad’s. Diana is a besotted mother. I am longing for my own bundle of hope just like him.
It immediately seemed a world away when I landed back in NYC. Big blowup with John Heilpern because I don’t like his Jessica Lange piece after all the agony it took to secure it. I can’t pretend I like something when I don’t. The piece has too much him, not enough her, a
nd he doesn’t want to revise it at all or report additional material, which pissed me off. It was so difficult telling him and he seemed to deliberately make it harder and more personal. He’s morose at the best of times but now it’s got really dark. I felt the resentment of a man being criticized by a woman. Miserable to deal with because I admire and love him.
One bright spot was Roy Blount calling up and saying he had Bill Murray in the lobby. Bill had read a profile of me in Ambassador magazine and wanted to check me out! They came in together and loafed around in my office for an hour, Murray being extremely hilarious. He was obviously hoping to find me as frisky and effervescent as my interview, but after the Heilpern altercation I wasn’t in great form and was likely a disappointment.
Saturday, August 11, 1984
Things came to a head at the office yesterday and we had some rock and roll, which was inevitable, and now we can get it right.
Tracy is clearly so disaffected I told her she should start to look for another job. I have tried to turn her around but I can’t. I know I shall miss her asperity. She was taken by surprise but shouldn’t have been, as reports of her bad-mouthing are multiple inside and out.
When I told PVZ I’d asked Tracy to start looking, she asked in that soothing tone, “Do you want me to have a conversation with her?” “Yes, I’d love you to have a conversation with her,” I said, thinking how useful it would be to have her do some fireside chat with Tracy that would extract happier cooperation until she leaves. The next day PVZ called and said, “I had a conversation with Tracy and she will be gone by Tuesday.” Wow. The way PVZ exits people with their “package” (it sounds almost Christmassy) is so polished that they almost feel they got promoted instead of fired.
I called in Wayne after these ructions and asked him for his support. He had been close to Tracy and wasn’t helping, but now I think he realizes that unless we get on board with the new mag it’s hopeless. The numbers still aren’t good enough for us to waste time on internal politics. All this was pretty horrible and made me wish I was a writer instead of an executive with all the fraught people management. I also feel lighter-hearted though. I have to build my own team and can’t screw around anymore with holdovers.
Michael Roberts swanned in with the light in his eye that announces good pictures. All his hours watching TV on his own have paid off, as he caught an interview with the Olympic relay team and had the brain wave of using them in a shoot with Bill King. He somehow reached one of them poolside and got them to agree—four hunky members of the swim team, discreetly naked, holding Raquel Welch aloft in a Busby Berkeley formation. So upbeat and commercial.
Meanwhile the Jessica Lange saga continued. Having had the drama with the piece, now the pictures blew up. Bill King got sick and couldn’t do Jessica, so I had to pull Annie Leibovitz off a David Mamet shoot, which made her furious. She insisted that the only way she would do it was against a white seamless background on a white horse, and Michael had better fucking call every stable in town.
Losing Tracy meant I no longer had any caption writer, which meant deploying Miles to rewrite Wayne’s captions. (As brilliant as Wayne is on structure and line-editing of a big piece, he is no good at captions. His caption on Annie’s wonderful picture of Harold Ramis holding his daughter upside down on a sand dune read, “Ramis, holding his daughter upside down on a sand dune.”) Miles loves it when I ask him to pitch in, especially when it means humiliating someone else. He took one look at the rejected Ramis headline “Ramis’ Second Act” (snore) and wrote “Grossbuster” over it in swaggering Magic Marker. At that moment Michael called to say there was a problem getting the horse into the elevator at the studio, after trotting it very happily down Eighty-Sixth Street. All was calming down when O’Brasky started to play musical chairs with his own staff and fired Kitty Mountain, his production executive who lives with ex-VF publisher Joe Corr, which O’Brasky felt meant she wasn’t on his team. All these comings and goings then led to a rumor on the street that I had been fired myself, and my phone was suddenly red hot with press inquiries. Si called to reassure me. Next day I went up to see him and asked if we could schedule more regular meetings. But as always when he suddenly senses need on the other side of the desk, he went cold on me. “I don’t think that’s really necessary,” he said, looking down at his yellow pad to indicate the meeting was over.
The office is much cooler without Tracy, but I need to find another wit. My hopes are all pinned on Bill Zehme, a writer from Chicago who sent something in over the transom and I pounced on it in the slush pile I took home for the weekend because he so clearly has a voice. If his next piece is as good as his first two, I will offer him a contract.
Tuesday, August 14, 1984
Thank God Alex is back from Connecticut. I have missed the maturity of his judgments. He backed up my queasiness about Helmut Newton’s new fashion spreads. Much though I love Helmut’s kinkiness, these were just too S and M for a mainstream mag, and I am sick of his telling me I am too bourgeois to appreciate them. Alex voted against the Raquel cover, declaring it was too tacky, which was a bit crushing. Is this more warfare against Michael Roberts? Jessica Lange on a horse, he said, had “more nobility.” He’s wrong. So I told him I would “defer” the decision.
I told him, which I knew would please him, how Si had come down to look at the October issue, said nothing, then gazed up at the framed Covarrubias illustrations from the thirties on my wall and said of one of them, “What a cover!” minutes after telling me how the mag I am editing is bombing in “C and D” markets, i.e., nonurban, bicoastal outlets.
“I doubt Covarrubias would have gone down well in C and D markets either,” I said gloomily to Alex. He laughed.
“Nostalgia has been the trouble with this magazine all along,” he said. “Always remember Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair was a failure.”
Meanwhile, last time I saw Barbaralee Diamonstein at the Four Seasons she said, “Congratulations on a fatter book.”
“You mean, more ads?” I said. “Yes, we’re pleased.”
“NO.” She rolled her eyes, the all-knowing media seer. “A MUCH fatter book. Aren’t Condé Nast buying you-know-what?”
Another flaming rumor of our demise, that Si is buying Connoisseur and folding VF into it. (Yet another new rumor: he’s buying Interview and ditto.) Was cheered up when New Republic literary ed Leon Wieseltier paid a visit from DC and went on about how girls’ shoes are an index to good sex and reminded me of the pink high heels I was wearing when he first came in to see me.
Monday, August 27, 1984
I am on the Jitney back to NYC after Ben Bradlee’s birthday party at Grey Gardens in East Hampton. I had forgotten how vivid Sally had made the house, the chintz sofas and curtains, the white wicker and flowers. It was odd to think that it’s three years since the operatic interlude of our wedding in their garden.
Mort Zuckerman came with Gloria Steinem, whom I liked much more than the last time, talking separately from the men. In fact it was an evening when I felt much warmer to the women in general. Nora Ephron, Sally, Lorne Michaels’s wife, Susan, and Gloria. We stood in a corner and talked, for some reason, about exhibitionists. “A girlfriend of mine went through a phase where guys in suits were always jerking off at her on the subway,” Susan Michaels said. Gloria was just passing the group and immediately stopped. “Maybe I should stick around here,” she said, in her low, ironic voice. “Maybe this group is interesting.”
Nora said she had a friend who for a long time was always followed by dwarves. “That’s funny,” Gloria said, “I had a period when I kept going on talk shows and finding I was on with a celebrity dwarf. One time we were all asked what our biggest problem was, and the dwarf said—his career! Can you imagine a female dwarf saying that?”
It was so much nicer to be with this crowd than it was the night before we got married in 1981. I remember walking along the East Hampton beach with Harry in a love cloud, so happy we had each other in the midst of a smug me
dia power elite who all knew one another and understood the same references and jokes. I still see this East Coast media crowd as pretty pleased with their insider status, but so are we now, I suppose, or on our way to be, and perhaps since we arrived as uptight Londoners it’s not surprising we had to earn the right of acceptance. I felt happy because so many people there seemed to have read the last issue of VF and be talking genuinely about the details of articles.
Of course the chintz glory of Grey Gardens made me itch to get started on decorating Quogue. On Saturday night, Ed and Carol Victor came over for supper and we picnicked in front of the fire as the sky went pink beyond the dormer windows. I want to build a wonderful deck and make it more private with beach pines, and put up a beach hut and build a pool and add on a study and make it all light and white and fresh like Sally has. Have to write a book to pay for it.
Mort now seems to be offering Harry the editorial director job at US News. It’s head spinning. Harry’s just got up to speed as editor in chief of Atlantic Monthly Press, where he’s been signing up books, and commuting to Boston, and now Mort wants him to do the two jobs and triangulate between Boston, New York, and Washington. Insane, but Harry, being insane himself, will probably do it.
Another rabid week in the VF hotbox. Charles Churchward is pushing a hip Japanese artist who wants to do street-life scenes and fads for us. We all sat around and had a “fad” meeting for ideas. Miles, white with flu and his usual premenstrual tension, said, “NO one does break dancing anymore. It’s ROSARIES everyone’s into.”
Charles said thoughtfully, “We have to think of a fad that will last till February because Yosuki takes three months to finish an assignment.”
“Then it’s not a fucking fad, is it?” Miles grumped.
Michael Roberts has suddenly become overtense and fed up with being in NYC and told me he may leave at Christmas to go back to London. He hates the weather. He’s sick of Alex as an uncertain, competitive force. He feels alienated by the American obsession with product and performance. He said he also feels black in New York in a way he didn’t in London. Taxis often won’t stop for him. He was shown the service entrance when he went to a fancy apartment recently, which understandably really pissed him off. I took him out to see the new Prince movie and dinner afterward at Un Deux Trois. I told him Harry and I only cope with NYC by subscribing to Country Life and looking at ads for pink stone houses in Gloucestershire. When Harry joined us later, Michael seemed genuinely thrilled. Perhaps it reminded him of happy early life at The Sunday Times in London. New York life is so harsh. I hadn’t thought about how much it means to Michael to be able to confide his angst with the people from his old life he most trusts. I feel closer to both him and Miles in New York than I did in London. We share the past and every so often it needs to be reaffirmed. I still keep expecting Michael to lash out with his old scorpion sting, but the hardness of the experience here is solidifying his own strength and the feline mind games are reducing. The next day in the office he looked up from a fashion sketch he was doing—his tall frame stooped over the layout table—with a smile of childlike warmth.