by Tina Brown
Sunday, September 2, 1984
Summer is fading, fading, fading. I dread the renewed velocity! Joan Buck made a good observation on the phone. That in the first year you live in New York the city tries to do you in. That’s exactly how I feel. Getting the cable guy to show up takes Herculean bilateral negotiations. All deliveries, it seems, are scheduled when they only know for a certainty you won’t be in to receive them. Just when I got settled into the apartment, scaffolding goes up in front and a lung-corroding, evil-smelling paint is slapped on, giving us both sore throats and stinging eyes. I sometimes think my rubber plants will attack me in the middle of the night. And I feel broke all the time despite earning so much money. I know it’s hugely unwise to buy the house on a land lease, which will make it a depreciating asset. I just love it so much and want to stay in Quogue forever.
Si is coming to dinner on Thursday. I’ve asked him with Robert Hughes and John Guare and then ten people afterward for brandy and coffee. I have made it lightweight and colorful now that I see Si’s longing to be with bohemian people. His own friends all seem fairly inexcusable. Roy Cohn, for God’s sake? Si seems to love thugs who give him a frisson of toughness. I am sure all the weird preponderance of modern art represents an oddity of Alfred Bloomingdale proportions. He is the only person apart from me and Michael who likes our cover of Paloma Picasso sneering out of a vicious pink gash of a mouth (which is fortunate, since he is the only person who matters). “I think it’s great poster art,” he told me in that shy, curiously chubby voice. But he probably just likes women who give him a hard time.
I am making a study of the merely rich versus the really rich. There is really nothing weirder than the latter … In his own way Si is just as ruthless as Rupert and the warmth he exudes when he feels like it is mostly transactional. There is a very cold detachment underneath that could make the inconceivable become the doable very quickly if it presented him with a solution.
Monday, September 10, 1984
A very productive week, albeit tough. PVZ urged me to stop hemming and hawing and reduce staff. She flipped open a folder with all the salaries in it and we went down the roster. We discussed tactics, football-huddle style, then separated and charged into the game. First, Pat Towers. PVZ got her to admit how unhappy she is and airplaned her into Vogue Features. Next Suzanne Stephens. I told her I wanted to convert her from full-time staff to writing contract. I think it actually is what she wanted and she waxed happy. Next, Daphne Davis. The ditziness is out of control and she wants my attention all the time. The recent discovery that she has a large private income made me feel less bad about telling her I had too many staff and not enough pages. It seems to go a lot better when I make it economic, not about performance. She took it like a soldier. The only one that went badly was Suzanne’s assistant, and that’s because PVZ delegated her deputy to have the conversation. We had agreed the assistant would get a job at House and Garden, but the HR deputy instead told her she would have to “rove” around Condé Nast. Hysteria ensued with me feeling like Klaus Barbie until PVZ managed to magic the job back from House & Garden. Because of our friendship, I asked Pam McCarthy to talk to John Heilpern about moving from an executive job to a writing contract but fear he will demand I fire him just to torment me. He’s so talented but refuses to take any direction when it doesn’t work. I hope our friendship survives.
There was a lot of wobbliness in the staff at so many departures, but it was a huge relief to feel VF finally has the people I want and it needs. H and I went downtown to Bob and Victoria Hughes’s for dinner. They had the languorous Brit writer James Fox, the book editor Shelley Wanger with boyfriend David Mortimer, Peter Duchin, the society band leader, and Brooke Hayward, the Hollywood princess and writer. Bob was in wonderful form, bounding around in a striped shirt and red suspenders, cooking the salmon he’d caught in Alaska. Victoria is beautiful, young, and an ex–art student I would guess who fell in love with him, which God knows is easy to do. Bob told me the intriguing fact that Si is crazy about electric trains. On Saturday mornings, Bob said, Si can be seen browsing around SoHo, looking at art and wearing a huge leather coat, with his driver crawling behind. The driver, says Bob, has been known to pull up at a deserted parking lot and take out an electric train set, which Si proceeds to operate by remote control. Can it be true? It’s too delicious if it is. Bob absolutely shares my perception of the marvel of Alex. “He is extraordinary, isn’t he?” he said. “He used to keep old Sam Newhouse—a Velázquez dwarf with a will of steel, by the way—under control in a way that no one else could. I once said to Alex, how do you keep him so cowed? And he said, ‘Well, you know, I find it very easy. Sam is a man who feels the need to change his tie every day.’” “And you know,” continued Bob, “he was right. The Velázquez dwarf appeared one day in a wide Mr. Fish tie, the next in a bow tie, but Alex has worn the same Savile Row knitted tie in a variety of dark colors for thirty years. That’s confidence. He spent the last three decades knocking up enormous sculptures and managing the most voluminous social life in New York. Did you know he was a champion skier at a time when skis were twenty feet long?”
I drank it all in, adding it to my rich picture of them all. I found Peter Duchin hard to take and wonder why Bob is so enamored of him. Too much name dropping at deafening volume. Every name that came up he had to show he knew some inside information about. I had my small triumph, however, when he said, “Wayne Lawson? Doesn’t he play tenor saxophone? I know him well.” Hah! No you don’t, chum! I DID like Shelley Wanger, though. She is subtle and thoughtful and sophisticated and her boyfriend, David Mortimer, is refreshingly low-key, too. Also liked Bob’s agent, Lynn Nesbit, with her short, chic hair and glistening tanned neck. She and Duchin pounded the conversational ball back and forth over the salmon. The next day James Fox called me up and said in his attenuated voice, “I didn’t understand a word of what anybody said last night. What is this New York chat all about?”
Next night was our own dinner for Si and Victoria and I was relieved the Hugheses didn’t bail, and in fact showed up early, looking well groomed, which was a very nice gesture on their part, realizing that having my boss to dinner was important to me. Five minutes before the guests arrived, I saw that the dinner table was too small and the engaging out-of-work thespian who came to cook from Chelsea Foods did a brilliant switch with the kitchen table. The dinner was a howling success. John Guare talked to me about the Goodman Theatre and the Chicago movement. “In two years’ time it will be somewhere else,” he said. “The magic moves on.” That thought about the transience of magic stayed with me. I want to bring the magic to Vanity Fair and it’s hard to know at this point whether I will succeed. Si was warm and relaxed but seemed older in the presence of his wife, who on second meeting seemed less likely to be wearing exotic underwear. The only time Si got really animated was when I touched on the daily domestic struggle of New York life. “Struggle!” he erupted, as I wiped down the sleeve of his jacket that he had unfortunately dipped into a boat of lemon sauce. “Struggle! Every day is a struggle! It’s a fight for survival! Not to get killed! I come from a privileged environment but I saw the example—every day! Struggle!” He relapsed into relative calm after that, leaving me to wonder what on earth had gone on behind closed doors in his youth. He left early as always and the last people to go were Michael Roberts and Bob Colacello, who sat on the sofa reminiscing about working with Truman Capote at Interview. I heard Colacello wail, “Truman was such a liar! We’d send him to Miami and the next thing we’d hear was he had been sighted at Dallas airport!”
By Friday, the strain of all this boss entertaining wiped me out. H left for London to see his kids so I left the city for Quogue on the seven p.m. Jitney with Miles. He’s been a lovely guest this weekend, wandering about in his pajamas and coming in from the beach with shells he suggested for my new color scheme. “Ticking would be a good idea. This is a ticking shell.” We walked along the beach on Friday night under an enormous moon, talking
about the VF office, and he rebuked me when I said, “I feel so sorry for Daphne Davis. She has no life.”
“Perhaps,” said Miles. “She has a wonderful aunt. People construct different emotional realities for themselves. Think of Quentin Crisp and his bonkers room. He’s happy. Everyone has different ways of coping.”
He’s right, of course, and my remark was both bourgeois and patronizing. I asked him if he will go back to London anytime soon. “I think not,” he said as we trudged along the sand in the moonlight. “I think I may have left London for good. But that doesn’t mean I’ll ever absorb America. Fenimore Cooper will never mean anything to me. But it doesn’t mean I’ll ever go back.”
I sometimes feel there’s a bravery, even nobility, to people who leave their own country for some other dream. It makes you so vulnerable. There is a bit of my own expatriate heart that’s frozen, not here, not there, a lonely thing.
Friday, September 14, 1984
Just realized in horror I missed Mum’s birthday yesterday. Something I have never ever done before. When I called her she pretended not to mind but I could tell she feels she’s losing me. I felt upset thinking of her in the house in Spain with the cats, wondering why I was silent. We were always such bfs. Our special time after she picked me up from school and we had tea together in the kitchen unloading my day. I think of the jangle of her coin bracelet when she came in from dinner and climbed immediately to my room to kiss me good night in a warm whiff of Je Reviens.
Mum, I miss you and will never forget your birthday again. I wrote a note telling her how much I love her.
Tuesday, September 18, 1984
Life is unmanageable. My oven has a cockroach in it. I am trying to give a dinner party for Alex and spare men keep dropping out. I feel I must be especially nice to him as Si keeps calling down with negative stats from his damn reader research, which focus-groups every page of the mag and finds, surprise surprise, that people are more interested in movie stars than they are in the book reviews. H and I are both knocked out by the New York pace. Last night we were both so tired after pulverizing days, we came home at nine and fell asleep without eating. Nicole Wisniak, the editor of the French luxury vanity mag Egoïste that the chic crowd all adore, came in from Paris seeking a retainer, which everyone says I should give her. She lectures me and puts the magazine down one minute while telling me how fantastique it is the next. My light relief is the new extrovert doorman who keeps bursting into song when I pass. Tonight he fell to his knees, singing, “Officer Krupke, I’m down on my knees!”
Saturday, September 22, 1984
I am in flight to LA for my first VF trip to Hollywood. Gotta get some good movie-star covers and see what’s popping on the West Coast after so long holed up in long-knived Manhattan. The dinner for Alex and Tatiana had all the wrong mix. Tatiana is a barking dinosaur. Harry charmed her, fortunately. I had asked Patrick McCarthy, the editor of WWD, to join us with the German film director Volker Schlöndorff, who I thought would spew high Kultur, but Volker dropped out, or rather, more aggravating, said he couldn’t show up till ten. Then he showed up at eight, beaming that he was able to make it after all, thus throwing out all my schemes of who sat with whom, and in the hasty relocation of placements everyone was sitting with the wrong person. Volker was sitting too far away from Alex and Tatiana, with whom he had much in common, and cocky, brash Patrick McCarthy obviously bored Alex, who regarded him as a mere midmanagement fellow. I realized in a blinding flash, seeing him with Tatiana after so long, that Alex is probably gay or, at any rate, somewhere on the borderline in the Edward, Prince of Wales genre, i.e., in the lifelong thrall of one woman who can sustain a Mrs. Simpson–like drag-queen fascination. Maybe that’s the secret in those dark, fathomless eyes … Bob Hughes told me that Alex had once said to him, “Do you think Si is morally weak?” which is generational code for a sexuality question that also very likely betrays his private attitude toward himself. It explains some of Alex’s opaqueness and the violence of his art. He flings all that fury that he may be “morally weak” against a canvas, and probably weeps into the lap of Tatiana when he’s done. Anyway, despite this interesting fictional insight, the dinner party was hell.
So was the rest of the week, thanks to David O’Brasky, who can be tone-deaf as to how to get business. We went to a hugely embarrassing lunch with the Philip Morris account, who want to pull out their spreads, as they only came in with ads in the first place because of warm relations with David’s predecessor in the job, Joe Corr. However, O’Brasky still kept trashing the previous VF regime, resolutely oblivious to the increasing stone face of the William Morris exec. Even the choice of lunch venue was all wrong, a very tight private room with a shut door and no air, from which you could still hear the extremely noisy Italian restaurant beyond. It felt like The Last Supper.
Before we got there, O’Brasky told me all the cigarette brands Morris could give us, then said, “And there’s a new one—Parliament, they’re working up for the end of 1985.” So when the boss man said at the end of David’s rabid sales pitch, “Well, Parliament you will certainly be a candidate for,” it was obvious—to me anyway—that that was Madison Avenue parlance for “You’re not going to get Benson and Hedges or anything else this year, chum. Line up for the never never.” I felt like emptying the red wine over O’Brasky’s head for blowing it so monumentally and not even realizing it.
On top of that was another wan attempt at a pitch at a dinner at the Diamonstein-Spielvogels’ Park Avenue apartment in honor of our mutual friend the Duke professor Joel Fleishman. Their insanely grandiose apartment is poised over Manhattan like an airborne Versailles. The table was set with silver place mats you could see your face in. Every time I looked down I stared forlornly up my own nostrils. In the dining room the acoustics were so bad it was like conversing in a swimming bath. Carl Spielvogel sat at the end of the table, a stuffed pelican pontificating about his latest bout of foreign travel to China, Bali, and the Soviet Union. A football field away, Barbaralee sat opposite him, oozing cultural self-esteem. I hyped VF’s new success like crazy and pretended fascination with every one of Carl’s early “nailing the account” stories, but he didn’t take the bait. At the end of dinner he threw the conversation open. Harry, who had contained himself till now, leapt in with some ill-timed remark about the bizarre US obsession with deficit reduction, talking forty times too fast as everyone stared at him, pickled in pomposity. Then a handsome figure dressed in liberal beige who runs the New York transport office delivered a great sonorous speech about how he had been in Europe all summer brooding on how Reagan’s grossly unfair policies had somehow produced the biggest US boom in memory. Let them eat place mats.
To cap it off, as I fled the city on Friday on the four p.m. train to Quogue with Harry, the lawyer came on to say that the mortgage for 160 Dune Road had been denied. It was crushing news, just when we had got to the signing of the land lease. On Saturday night we had to go through dinner with John Post, who is currently staying at his beach house next door to us. I felt sure his hard Yankee stare could penetrate that we didn’t have a way to pay for 160, but we proceeded with a full-force charm offensive to buy ourselves time. All of this madness has brought H and me so close. We have found our spiritual home in the US together and at the same time, and that at last eliminates our twenty-five-year age difference. The feeling I always had in England that there was this other married life he had before me that I could never compete with has vanished. We are in everything together now.
Thursday, September 27, 1984
Yippee! I love Beverly Hills! I love the climate, the smells, the palm trees, the shiny surfaces of Hollywood people. I feel I will end up here, that it’s where I ought to be. I have avoided the movie world ever since childhood made me jaded but now feel the glossy pull again …
Maybe Hollywood feels less judgmental than NYC, where the hammer is always about to fall on some frail career. Here, you can write your own story. Careers are reinvented every
day. I have felt a growing hunger for chancier people, and to talk to the directors, writers, producers, actors of my early youth.
I went with Horst to see the “superagent” Swifty Lazar at his Trousdale house, perched on the hills overlooking the flat roofs and the sparkling swimming pools of the people he represents. Swifty is tiny and bald and hairy in the wrong places. From the back his bald head and ancient baby’s neck look like crinkled foreskin. Just to be perverse, Michael Roberts wants to photograph him for a fashion feature. Swifty perched on a coffee table with his tiny legs swinging, holding forth about stars having no clue how to entertain anymore. “Warren Beatty? Lives in a hotel suite. Al Pacino? Lives in a truck. I don’t know what’s the matter with them. They don’t have a chef. They don’t buy art. Debra Winger? What can I say? Never shaves under her arms.”