by Tina Brown
Hackett once said to me that you have to be able to throw a magazine on the floor opened to any page and instantly know what magazine you’re looking at and who the reader is. That’s already true of VF. It has quickly found a strong, vital identity in voice and in visuals. The house style (a blending of me and Miles and Schiff and Wolcott) is very much there. But not the consistent, essential element of a satiating story, the one that tells you, the reader, who you are or who you want to be.
Friday, March 8, 1985
Boom! Si bought The New Yorker! He paid $142 million, a sum that gives me a stomachache. The staff there are all fretting and fussing and crying into their lace handkerchiefs. They should be so lucky. I know firsthand how much Si worships that magazine and reads every word. Apparently someone there took our current Annie cover of naked Jerry Hall in tumbled sheets and replaced her head with an image of the New Yorker’s mascot, Eustace Tilley. There are rumblings Si may remove William Shawn as editor and install Bob Gottlieb from Knopf, but again I can’t believe it. Si reveres Mr. Shawn, as he always calls him, as a kind of literary shaman, a divine force who conjures imperishable words out of writers, words that often end up as Random House books, which I guess is part of his full-circle vision of his publishing empire. What does it mean for us? Si has a new love is what it means, which is unsettling.
Wednesday, March 20, 1985
My industrious hire from The Sunday Times in London, James Danziger, showed his worth as features ed of Vanity Fair by getting us a shoot with the Reagans at the White House through his and their Hollywood friend Doug Wick. We needed this scoop so bad, there was no chance we could fuck it up. So I recruited Harry Benson, the excitable Scottish photographer with toilet-brush hair who talks so much and works so fast that he has managed to get six presidents to give up human moments. “I’m better with Republicans,” he told me. “Democrats are always a wee bit tricky.” Also got Chris Buckley to write the piece to go with it about their marriage, which should be delicious.
My heart was beating so fast that I hardly noticed the august surroundings as we were ushered into a visitor’s waiting room at the White House. I was terrified there would be a last-minute cancellation. The press aide informed us that the president and Mrs. Reagan were due at a state banquet they were hosting for Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín but would pause for a swift formal portrait in the Map Room. As soon as the aide had departed, Benson produced a boom box from his bag and unscrolled a white background to create a portable studio. I thought the idea sounded really hokey when he told me, but he clearly knew what he was doing.
At six forty-five we heard the familiar mellow burr of the approaching commander in chief accompanied by the light social laughter of Nancy Reagan. They entered the Map Room dressed in their elegant best for the black-tie function: Nancy in a slinky jet-beaded Galanos gown, Ronnie in a Fred Astaire–fit tux, with patent crenellated hair and cordial, twinkly blue eyes. Benson immediately hit the switch of the boom box and flooded the room with the old Sinatra classic “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).” Reagan paused for a moment, looking first at us and then at Nancy with one raised eyebrow, Clark Gable style.
“I love this song, honey,” she said. “Let’s dance.” The president replied with a line that might have been written for any number of vintage B movies: “We can’t keep the president of Argentina waiting, Nancy.”
“Oh, Ronnie,” she teased, grabbing him by his broad shoulders, “let him wait!” She kicked back her leg (click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr, went Harry Benson’s camera), and, perhaps in a paradigm of their easy marriage, the president stopped resisting and took his wife in his arms. For the next fifteen minutes they fox-trotted blithely around the Map Room to more Sinatra oldies on Benson’s cassette player, exchanging the gossip of the day with each other as if no one else were there. I watched in silence, I could hardly breathe.
“A kiss!” shouted a now-ecstatic Benson, juggling three cameras. “Mr. President, give your wife a kiss!”
They moved closer. Their eyes closed. Their lips came together for the iconic moment that my happy heart knows is going to be flashed on TV screens over and over when it comes out. And then the Secret Service moved in and they were spirited away.
Now the pictures are spread on the VF light box in the office. I feel they are gold dust. The gaiety of this cover will be not just the Reagan kiss, but the kiss of life for Vanity Fair. The mood of the pictures is pure optimism. I’ve never much liked Reagan, but when I look at these pictures I have to admit he has the gift of instinctive collusion between imagery and national mood. And Nancy is critical to it. She is his joy gene. Coming out of the Carter recession, America needs this simple exuberance. Did they discuss it first? Benson never said he was bringing a boom box, so it must have been spontaneous. Their duality never fails to pick up the rhythm of what the public needs.
Tuesday, March 26, 1985
In LA for Swifty Lazar’s famous annual Oscar party at Spago. Hand it to Swifty, he does know how to rope in the celebrities and, more impressive, when he’s the host they actually behave. He domesticates the menagerie and they attend under his terms or not at all.
He loves every bit of it. Especially the great theatrical moment when the valet parking rises to a crescendo and the paparazzi bulbs start flashing as the stars start pouring into Spago from the award ceremony. He had so many famous faces there in the gyrating room. Andy Warhol with a tiny camera taking pictures, Michael Caine, Raquel Welch, Dennis Hopper, Linda Evans, Sally Field, who made a comically emotional Oscar acceptance speech about how we LIKE her, we really LIKE her, and Jackie Bisset, with Alexander Godunov swirling around air-kissing. Barry Diller was crammed up against the bar. “It’s important to stay till just past midnight,” he told me. “That’s when the bullshit all somehow metastasizes and you see Oscar night at its best.” I read this morning that Shirley MacLaine cut me, but I didn’t notice. The producer Ray Stark told me Swifty’s germ phobia apparently means he has to spray with disinfectant everyone who enters his house. He said that Mary Lazar is the only woman Swifty could find to marry who was exactly room temperature.
Tuesday, April 2, 1985
The New York Times reporter Alex Jones slagged off VF’s prospects in The New York Times last week so I asked him to lunch. Was prepared for combat but really liked his Tennessee charm.
We had three coffee refills, which I hope affects the next round of coverage.
Our office has become a bear garden of socialites. The artist Richard Merkin, who came in to tout a new illustration, added to the turmoil this afternoon. I walked into the art department and he was perched on the edge of the layout table, shouting into the telephone.
“Have you seen this photograph of Jerry Zipkin on a camel?” I asked him, since he was sitting on the photo shoot of Iris Love’s trip up the Nile with the San Francisco socialite Ann Getty and co. “Loved him. Hated her,” Merkin replied, and went on shouting. Iris, a fizzy blonde archaeologist, is the love interest of Liz Smith and there will be hell to pay if I don’t publish her piece. Trouble is, picture’s great, copy not. Liz was a great friend of Leo and has not yet forgiven me for replacing him. Reinaldo Herrera appeared in a new cashmere overcoat, carrying a bag of pretzels. He’s now a contributing editor thanks to Bob Colacello. Although he’s such a courtier to the ladies who lunch, he still has news flair from his days as a talk show host in Caracas. He’s out every night of the week with his wife, Carolina, the fashion designer. Half his ideas are flimflam. But the other half are things I want and he’s a great barometer of who’s rising and falling in the global social action. Also has a fund of new preposterous characters for us to profile and photograph. Today he starts baritone complaints about how he can’t get pictures of grand houses into the mag unless the owners can be sure every other house will be grand. I tell him I can’t design the magazine around his ridiculous friends. Besides, I remind him, we are soon to publish a lavish spread on the turreted palace of Princess Gloria von Thurn
und Taxis, aka Princess TNT, the over-the-top German socialite Bob Colacello is obsessed with. “The Thurn und Taxis are mad,” says Reinaldo, chomping on a pretzel. “Let me tell you that there are people you and I know who would simply get up and leave the room when the Thurn und Taxis walk into it.”
Nick Dunne turned up to talk about stories, which added to the static because he and Reinaldo are so competitive. He tells me a Park Avenue hostess was carried out of Mortimer’s at one a.m. the other night, as was Isabel Eberstadt. “It was exactly like a scene from The Damned,” Nick says.
Like me he is utterly fascinated and appalled by the Andrew Crispo murder case, in which a young male model was found shot and buried wearing a black leather mask following an S and M session with the creepy art dealer Crispo. It confirmed to me some of the darker currents I feel when I go to swell dinners, an underside of New York decadence. So glad Nick is on the von Bülow case. The second trial of Claus is coming up, accusing him of the attempted murder of his heiress wife, Sunny, at their Newport home by administering an overdosed insulin injection. It has left her in a coma for the rest of her life. It looks like Claus von Bülow let his wife die. At any rate, he is another dark bastard and I’d love to see him nailed. Stephen Schiff showed up to turn in his Wallis Annenberg profile. He handed me her husband’s shockingly juicy divorce deposition. “Here,” he said. “A treat.”
Went to Brit writer Jon Bradshaw’s publishing party at Elaine’s and asked Tom Wolfe if he’d consider writing about the Crispo case. Would be so excellent if he would. “No writer who touches this subject can escape the mire,” he says. “The filth rises over their heads. It’s a serious, big subject.” Which is Tom’s polite, southern way of saying it’s not for him.
Evening ended at a dinner party at Diane von Furstenberg’s apartment with her new boyfriend, the suave Italian writer Alain Elkann. Also there, two architects, Michael Graves and Peter Marino, and Kitty Hawks, whose parents were the film director Howard Hawks and the famous social beauty Slim Keith. She reminds me of Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby. Diane is obviously mad about Alain. She occasionally shot him deadly, sensuous looks over the giant tulip bowl.
The apartment was a bit suffocating with its love seats, framed ancient wallpaper, and God knows what mythic art hanging on the hectic walls. The talk was all about the erstwhile style writer of the Times, John Duka, and his conversion to the EST cult [Erhard Seminars Training—a two-weekend, sixty-hour, intensive consciousness seminar]. Marino said, “Isn’t John Duka selling trousers at Bergdorf now?”
“He’s doing PR for their menswear, yes,” says DVF, who’s always loyal to people who have given her good press.
“I am so pleased,” said Kitty. “Such a much better career for him than that pathetic column in the Times.”
“Selling trousers is better than a column?” says Alain, with a small ironic smile. “Not a bookshop? Not even a stationery shop?”
“It will all pass,” said Michael Graves, looking melancholy. “Like those sixteen hundred Moonie people who got married in Madison Square Garden.”
I say, “That’s a great story. I’d love to know what happened to those marriages.”
“The same thing that happened to all our marriages,” yawned Kitty Hawks.
Thursday, April 4, 1985
The Iris Love up-the-Nile saga built to a shuddering climax when she called this morning to say she wouldn’t accept Sharon DeLano’s editing of her piece. This is rich, given the gibberish it was when turned in and what a skillful rework Sharon has been able to do. Sharon is a great editing hire, recommended to me by the art critic John Richardson. She was on The Movies mag, which folded, and before that The New York Review of Books. She’s very different from the rest of the VF crew. Grew up in a small ranching town in Oregon, got a master’s degree, and in the early seventies drove across the country to New York in a VW bus. Before The New York Review she had a job at a crappy publishing house in Union Square next to Max’s Kansas City and proofread for Kiss and Screw. Apparently Silvers hired her for the Review within minutes of the interview because of the utter confidence of her literary opinions.
Sharon is living proof to me of the value of hiring on instinct and life texture rather than résumé. She has formidable intellectual rigor. Most of her writer contacts come from hanging out with Susan Sontag and a bunch of opera queens who took her to Parsifal and offbeat art movies. She has a fierce, graying, Louise Brooks bob, always wears black, and stomps around in scuffed cowboy boots. Iris Love picked the wrong adversary.
Ten minutes after I put the phone down on Iris, Sharon marched into my office at her most truculent, saying she was done with making nice to this crazy old bat just because her girlfriend writes a gossip column. In fact I had already decided the night before that her Iris edit was actually too light. All the asp-kissing stuff (as Sharon dubbed it) about the charming, fascinating socialites who went on the cruise has to come out. I told Sharon to deliver that message and, as predicted, Liz Smith got on the horn to give me the full Texan bawl-out. I am now as fed up with them all as Sharon. I called Iris on speaker with Sharon in the room and told her I thought Sharon had done an excellent edit, and Iris should accept her cut of five hundred words. “Let me know by two p.m. if you accept the edit, otherwise, alas, we have to cancel the piece.” I went out to lunch only to find a bunch of messages from the Le Cirque mafia on return. Iris, I realized, had just shot herself in the foot by calling Ann Getty and her sidekick, the shipping millionaire Alecko Papamarkou, to complain about me, only to find they then insisted that (a) the copy had to be read by Lord Weidenfeld, who put the trip together, and (b) every person in her snapshots had to be called for permission to use them.
Perfect! Maybe I can now pull the whole pesky story, except this got Liz back on the phone. For all the bluster, the last thing Iris wanted was the loss of face that would come with having the piece killed. I placated Liz by telling her that I was very happy to publish Iris if she’d accept the edit. Then I called George Weidenfeld about the pictures, waxing astonished that Iris didn’t seek permission from the people on the cruise to use private snapshots. “Call Ann Getty and tell her that,” said George, “and I am sure she will understand.” (Of course she will, because they all really want their pics used in VF but have to pretend they are furious.) This was doubly good because Ann has been in a rage with us since our front-of-book piece on her million-dollar curtains. This gave the opportunity for détente.
I called Ann full of dismayed solicitude and we both agreed that Iris is beyond the pale. She agreed to let us publish the pictures. All’s well that ends well. Iris accepted the edit; we got photo permission and brought Ann Getty back on our side as well.
Friday, April 5, 1985
More social monstering.
Tea with the Houston grande dame Lynn Wyatt at the Carlyle.
Lynn is a platinum-blonde Texan Barbie doll with a wonderful, full-throated laugh. Her conversation really boils down to a series of very positive interjections. “You do it!” “Here’s to you!” “And how!” It’s hard to know how she can bear to be married to Oscar Wyatt, who has the mean-eyed conviviality of the old wildcatter he is. The last time I saw him at a gala, his huge body was squeezed uneasily into a dinner jacket, ready to spill out and sabotage her elegance at any minute. Still, he’s paying for it all, as he never ceases to remind you (and her). “Oscar can tell exactly what carat a diamond is just by looking at it,” Lynn told me.
Today she wears a wide-shouldered brown Saint Laurent suit jacket and miniskirt topped by an outsize head of flicked-up hair. I am after access for pics of her new ranch in South Texas where Oscar has installed an airstrip for his 747. She tells me that Plácido Domingo had come for Easter with his three children and they shot coyote.
She has just returned from the Arctic Circle with her son Steve, who went to shoot polar bears. She and Oscar had tried living in an igloo. It’s hard to imagine anyone the size of Oscar in an igloo, especially in a Stets
on. “Tina, it’s cold in an igloo,” she says as we sip the Earl Grey. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. And you have to eat seal meat so it sits in your stomach. I wore cashmere underwear, but Tina, it was cold.” She promises to ask Oscar about the pictures of the ranch (who I fear will say no, as he hates publicity as much as she loves it) and begs me to come back to Houston.
The place is full of copy, I must say. We need to do a special issue on Texas. A good source would be the fashionable florist Leonard Tharp, whom I met at one of Lynn’s dos during Tatler days. “I’ve done minny minny wonderful parties here,” he told me. “I try and advise clients to break out of their rut. I’ve always thought it so awful to come into a party, look at the flowers, and say, Who died? But then why shouldn’t a funeral be festive and fresh? And why can’t a party have all the poetry of a funeral? I’ve had to explain this minny minny times.”
Sunday, April 7, 1985
After this round of social frenzy I am worrying about the future of the mag. Went up to see PVZ, whom, even though she is really a corporate spy, I still value enough to use as a sounding board. She was sitting at her clean desk, looking as smooth and flawless as Scandinavian furniture. Her low, confidential voice makes you want to tell her everything.
I talk to her about my worries over Si’s commitment long-term to VF. The ads are still not coming, even though the readers are. He said he would give it time, but will he? It’s a year since my first issue. I can feel his attention turning away to The New Yorker. Will he feel it’s a better bet to build that up and lose his ardor for VF? The rumors keep swirling he will fold VF and combine the two. He’s very impetuous, I notice. When he gives up on something or someone, the light goes out of his eyes and it’s all over. PVZ listened and listened like a shrink but at the end just gently told me to keep doing my job.