by Tina Brown
I thought he’d stand me up but, even so, had raced to Bergdorf’s to buy a slinky black top and turquoise jacket to impress the world’s most seductive man. In fact, he confirmed the meeting several times throughout the day, each time adjusting the time a bit.
When he emerged out of the elevator at the Ritz he looked not so much a movie star as a disheveled intellectual in horn-rimmed glasses, tousled hair, and amorphous tweedy jacket. Only the unserious nose was reminiscent of Warren Beatty. The waiter tucked us into a table set for dinner, and under better lighting I could get a real look. His hair comes bouncing off his crown in a distinctly lightweight way. And his voice is light and Californian. It doesn’t have the film-star timbre of Jack Nicholson. A very pretty waitress asked us what we wanted to drink. Beatty immediately registered her. “Are you the one who wants to go to NYU?” he asked. “Yeah, it’s me.” “I hope”—a magical smile—“you are really studying hard.” Someone waved across the dining room. He took off one pair of glasses and put on another and said hi to Alan Jay Lerner. Then he put both pairs away and smiled at me myopically. That’s when I got the movie-star charisma. The crow’s-feet around the worn eyes all spring to attention, full of charm and irony. “Well, Tina,” he said, “why are we having this drink? I only agreed to it because I really like Caroline. But, you know, I don’t want to be interviewed.” We dodged around that one for a bit. “How do you feel about David Thompson’s piece on California in this month’s issue?” I asked. Warren said nothing, but took his face into a sequence of silent reaction shots that were more expressive than anything he could say. They ranged from incredulity to pity, despair, hilarity. “If I really knew you I would tell you what I think,” he said when he was done. “And it would be all about embarrassment for the guy who wrote it. But tell me, Tina, do you have any brothers or sisters?” A phone was brought to our table. He said into the mouthpiece, “Let me make a suggestion that may sound off the wall. Why don’t you do this for no fee? I mean it could really work to come across as someone who’s doing this for no money? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. It was just a thought.” Hangs up. “Are your parents still alive, Tina?” I told him I thought he should do some memorable pictures with Annie Leibovitz. “What’s memorable? I don’t like what she does to people. She’d make me take my shirt off.”
“Helmut Newton.”
“I don’t like all his whips and chains. What about the guy who’s been photographing Jack [Nicholson] for you?”
“Herb Ritts?”
“Yeah. Does he take pretty pictures?”
“He’s good,” I said, and responding to the flirtatious gleam creeping into his eyes: “But I don’t like using him because he doesn’t let the editor in chief come to the cover shoots.”
“Are you telling me you’d have to be on this shoot?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do I look as if I am fighting that, Tina?”
I brought the new June issue to show him, which probably wasn’t such a great idea because it’s more lightweight than May was. It has the great piece on the Duchess of Windsor, yes, but he probably wouldn’t care about that. He’s always trying to seem a political savant but I am not entirely sure he qualifies, though he’s certainly smart … said he thought von Bülow on the cover was a big mistake and “only skimmed it,” which I don’t agree with and don’t believe.
We talked about the need to satirize the rich at this moment. He brought up Shampoo, which, we agreed, is just the kind of film people want right now. “Who could write a sharp movie about the rich now?” (Me, I thought.) “Maybe Fran Lebowitz,” he said, in that darting, table-hopping way. “I see her hanging out at some odd functions, looking mildly uncomfortable.”
“Is she too much in the rich’s thrall?” I pondered. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked interested. “That’s what you want for this subject,” he said. “Someone who swam along with the rich, worked their way through it to the edges, rejected it, and now half hankers for it, even knowing what it means.” Maybe he is very insightful, I thought, despite the tiny attention span.
In another mental table hop he started talking about my resemblance as an editor to Diana Vreeland. “Wasn’t she fantastic?” he said. “Wasn’t she just great? Shall we call her up and tell her?” The waiter brought the phone and he dialed her number without looking it up. Then he was spelling out his name to her foreign maid until Vreeland came on the line. He turned on the charm full blast. It was as if he was positioning himself to reseduce the old fashion diva at the other end of the line and was going to give it all he got. “Diana?” he said. “It’s Warren. I’m sitting here in the Jockey Club with Tina Brown and we’re just saying how wonderful you are.” (Pause.) “Yes, wonderful. Well, if you’ve got laryngitis and can’t speak, just listen. You’re wonderful. And I am going to come and see you in two days. Yes! Because you’re wonderful!” Charm, tenderness, intimacy oozed out of him.
Then he hung up and was on to why Ann Getty should be the mayor of San Francisco, how David Gergen is underrated, how Mort Zuckerman has a chance of being important “if he plays it right.”
I circled inexorably back to the prospect of a Vanity Fair cover story and the photo session with Herb Ritts. “You know what you are, Tina?” he said. “You’re a closer. I have a friend in the hamburger business who taught me that expression.” He walked me out to my car, making me wait to let him guess which one it was. “So your husband’s in Washington half the week?” (Pause.) “Which half?” And then, “How do we progress this now?”
“I’ll call Herb Ritts,” I said.
“No, no. I didn’t mean the pictures. Look, anytime you want to waste some time … no interviews.”
Saturday, May 24, 1986
Gregor von Rezzori’s piece arrived, retracing Humbert Humbert’s journey across America with Lolita. It’s forty years since Nabokov wrote the original. “It was as if Humbert had been married to Lolita for a quarter of a century and then decided to have a look at where she came from,” Gregor writes. Then he takes off on his darkly amusing reflections, contrasting the brashness of today with the different brashness of then. There was no girl-child accompanying Gregor, of course, or he’d be in handcuffs instead of celebrating with me about how well it turned out at the Four Seasons. I slightly wish I had asked Martin to write it as he’s such a Nabokov junkie, but he would probably have asked if it was necessary to do the drive. Anyway, it’s perfect for the August issue and I am now rushing it in.
Monday, May 26, 1986
Memorial Day
Back from the ABA in New Orleans on a plane jam-packed with sweating, partied-out publishers. When I got to my seat I found Faber and Faber’s Matthew Evans sitting in it. We both had the same seat number. The stewardess demanded he leave the plane. He refused. (I hid during this altercation as I didn’t want him to recognize me and it would have made the conflict even more embarrassing.) I was convinced I was going to be turfed off the plane, which made me frantic as I needed to get back to G and was already tired and hot and pissed off. They finally found me a seat at the back, where I palpitated in sardine intimacy for the rest of the flight with two beer-breathed book packagers while I continued to hide from Matthew behind a Wall Street Journal.
In a deft piece of family publishing synergy Harry is now coming out with the Picasso sketchbooks as a book for Atlantic Monthly Press, which he still half runs for Mort. He hosted an ABA party for Paloma Picasso. We had lunch with the preposterous Princess Michael of Kent, who looked about fifteen hands high in an orange silk wrap dress. She has developed a mad, false laugh and a new Lady Bracknell voice for dealing with inferiors. “Row-eena,” she gushed at the cowed debutante she totes around as her “lady-in-waiting,” “where is the Dom Perignon? It was sitting outside but those fooools have taken it away! Find it!” (Mad false laugh.) “Isn’t the service quite diabolical? Do shut the kitchen door, Rowena. I hate to stare into a kitchen!”
After the party we went out to dinner with Paloma and Ed Victor
and Sarah Giles and Leonardo Mondadori, who is publishing the sketchbooks in Italy, and we had so many laughs. Howard Kaminsky, the short, comical publisher of Random House, is a wisecrack a minute. I see why Si likes him. He took a party out on a boat to see the alligators and asked the guide if he gave “good swamp.”
Wednesday, June 11, 1986
I finally had my kiss-and-make-up lunch with Oscar, who is still “totally offended” but off the war path. He told me all about his son, Moses, whom he found in a trash can in the Dominican Republic and adopted. I was touched. A nicer side of Oscar at last.
The September issue is a real pain in the ass, with stories going down like bowling pins. But one great thing is that the Reagans have agreed to sit for our feature, “Staying Married Is the Best Revenge,” as have the Buckleys, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and the Libermans. Harry Benson came up with another great idea tonight. The Thatchers! Dynamite!
I have finally decided to get the last twenty pounds of baby weight off with a trainer coming to torture me three times a week. He’s a bespectacled eunuch with huge thighs called Richard who says “Good job!” and “Go get ’em” as I wrestle with push-ups and sit-ups and bends.
Si and Victoria took us out to dinner at Arcadia with Jane Kramer of The New Yorker. Si was at his most relaxed and genial, coming out with some memorable Si-isms. When I asked him why he liked Vienna so much, he said, “Because it’s so … boring. People always answer the phone there on the second ring and they never put you on hold.” Victoria is, I realize, very much like Si. She loves going to their Florida house because there is no staff. “I put my foot down and said we only buy the house if there is no art and no servants! Then I know if I put something down, it will still be there next time I look.”
Jane complained to Si about the latest willfully tedious three-parter in The New Yorker. But Si defended it, revealing as he did that he had read all three parts, which, he said, with a beatific smile, “all hung together with a subtle homogeneity when read all together.” The irony is, he may be the only person left who has done so, including, I suspect, William Shawn.
Thursday, June 12, 1986
The Dunne-Herrera combo has brought in a great scoop on Imelda Marcos in exile. She is said to have lost most of the fortune her husband scammed as president of the Philippines, but who knows what lurks in offshore bank accounts, artwork, and jewelry, and then there’s her collection of almost a thousand pairs of shoes. Reinaldo can always be counted on to be on great terms with the wives of despots, whom he inevitably finds extremely charming and much misunderstood.
Turns out he had stayed often with Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos in Manila and partied along with them and Colin Tennant on Mustique. He got Imelda’s agreement for an interview and soon Nick was on his way to Hawaii with promised access to the Marcos hideout. He says he sat on his balcony at the Kahala Hilton for four days, waiting for the call, until he decided, fuck it, and showed up uninvited at a local pro-Marcos Filipino-American community birthday celebration in Imelda’s honor. He had the smarts to stay for the full five hours in the auditorium, then sidled over to introduce himself. That’s what’s great about Nick. He can hustle like a shoe-leather hack when he needs to, then charm his way to Imelda’s three-bedroom rental. He said it was protected only by snoring guards and bustling domestics, a comedown, for sure, from the days when they owned twenty-nine presidential “rest houses” and a palace to host parties in by the sea. He got a three-hour interview with her of total unburdening that’s gonna make so much news.
Monday, June 16, 1986
Quogue
We have had Cape publisher Tom Maschler in from London, staying with his girlfriend in Quogue. This house absorbs guests wonderfully. The sums Tom talked about paying his British authors seem ridiculously small after living in New York. Martin Amis was paid fifteen thousand pounds for his latest book! That seems pitifully small to me, given the size of his reputation. We are paying ten thousand dollars for an article.
And yet in London, where we were paid much less—Harry seventy thousand pounds and me eighteen thousand pounds a year—we seemed to never think about money at all. We felt we were living like kings at Ponsonby Terrace, minutes from the center of London, with four stories to roam around and our own studies with their creepered windows, the cats frisking along the wall I called the Cat Corridor dividing us from the neighbors. Here, with Harry paid two hundred thousand dollars and me paid a hundred and fifty-five thousand—astronomical sums!—we talk about very little else and live in a two-bedroom apartment. Quogue, of course, is where the money has gone, and we don’t begrudge a dime of it. I wish I could cook in my new wonderful kitchen. I envy women like Julie Kavanagh, a domestic goddess with a chopping board who whips up amazing dishes so casually, then sits down and writes a brilliant book. I have zero confidence in the kitchen. I can executive-produce dinner, it seems, but not cook it.
Tuesday, June 17, 1986
Olivia Channon, the Guinness heiress and Oxford undergraduate, overdosed on heroin and died, and I am wondering whether I should get on a plane and try to re-create her story. Not sure why it haunts me so much. I always remember this as Oxford’s magic time, of finals week and the greenness of the river, of gliding in a punt past the sweet-smelling banks with a bottle of cold white wine (in the days when I could still drink). Perhaps also because I devoured the riveting diaries of her American-born grandfather Henry “Chips” Channon, which chronicles with such a keen eye the world of London society before the war.
How could Olivia have wanted to dull her senses from the beauty of Oxford in June? Sarah Giles, who knows many of the people around Channon, is calling around, seeing if any of them would talk about it. I keep thinking about Olivia slumped in her heroin vomit in her room at Christchurch. Who let her down?
Monday, June 23, 1986
Came to Oxford. Immediately felt odd leaving Georgie for the first time. Brought Sarah Giles to help me connect with people. Ed Victor suggested I hire Willie Mostyn Owen’s daughter, Allegra, who knew the Channon group and wants to be a journalist. Met with her today, a very beautiful third-year PPE [philosophy, politics, and economics] student at Trinity who exudes the usual low-energy blankness of upper-class youth. Was glad to shed her at a Boojums drinks party. The kids were a lot more friendly there. Liked the current editor of Isis, a sparky blonde in a very short skirt, and there were some sweet, pudgy old Etonians with open faces.
Gottfried von Bismarck, in whose room Olivia died, seems to have been a deeply bad influence, not just because of his drug habit. Beanpole thin, with a cadaverous stare, he was known for hanging around looking gaunt when he was not off in Gstaad or Verbier or Bavaria. The one quotable thing Allegra told me about Olivia was that she told her Gottfried had asked her “to feel his scalp because he knew it would repel me.”
I had lunch with a bunch of posh students Allegra knows, including her boyfriend, a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson. This group seemed more invested in the story not being told. I felt a ring of class loyalty and not enough time to penetrate. Frustration with being an editor on a short time frame instead of a reporter who can hang out.
Thursday, July 3, 1986
Quogue
Allegra Mostyn Owen turned out to be bad news. She wrote a really nasty piece about me in The Sunday Telegraph, even though she was supposed to be working as my paid researcher. The centerpiece was the lunch with Boris Johnson and co. But Allegra wasn’t present, so Boris must have told her what to write—a snide, garbled version of what I said, because he took no notes and clearly re-created it, full of falsehoods, from memory—and then she put her byline on it. I was truly gobsmacked by the awfulness of it. God knows why smiling Boris would behave this way either. I wrote a letter to the Telegraph, pointing out the “author” Allegra wasn’t actually at the lunch she described, which they are going to publish, and hopefully it will detract from any further career she may want to have in journalism. But Bo
ris Johnson is an epic shit. I hope he ends badly.
G has been so lovably sweet since my return that I want to eat him toe by toe. And now we have another VF baby! The miraculous Pam McCarthy gave birth to an eight-pound boy, Joseph Winston McCarthy, on Wednesday night. Her first day of maternity leave! She closed the September issue, played in Chris Garrett (whom I had the brain wave of asking to come fill in for her for three months from her job as managing editor of Tatler), and dropped the baby. Her balancing skills are truly breathtaking.
I feel proud that we are managing these maternity exits with our own seamless organizational concepts—with the backing of PVZ, who helped me sell the idea to Si. We are just figuring it out on our own—bringing Chris Garrett from London to shadow Pam so we don’t skip a beat, and then when Pam comes back, Chris packs her bags and flies off with her umbrella. Why don’t all big companies do this?
Monday, July 7, 1986
Heat wave continues. Chris Garrett’s first day in the saddle greatly reassures me. I am lucky to know these two incredible women who understand how I work and are perfect counterbalances to my whirling ways.
Assigned a piece to a terrific new writer whom Sharon DeLano brought in—Alex Shoumatoff, shambolic, clever, Russian (by origin). I could tell from his endless circuitous storytelling in my office that he has a marvelous eye for detail. Writes sometimes for The New Yorker. Sharon felt he would be great for a story I am currently consumed by—the murder of the feminist primatologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda. This tale has it all. Mystery. Feminism. Gorillas. The village people called Fossey “Nyiramacibili” (the Woman Who Lives Alone in the Forest), which sounds immediately poetic and mysterious.