The Vanity Fair Diaries

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The Vanity Fair Diaries Page 29

by Tina Brown


  H and I fell into the car with G at the end of the day and careened out to Quogue in time for a wedding anniversary dinner at the local inn. It’s five years since we got married at the Bradlees’ Grey Gardens. Well, the friendship may not have lasted, but the marriage did. We toasted the fact that yesterday Si officially hired Harry to conceive and launch a brand new monthly travel magazine. Sprung from US News in DC at last with a New York–based job. Hurrah! One of the many things that stuns me about Harry is the way he approaches every task, big or small, with the same level of intellectual intensity. I know friends are wondering what the fuck the guy who was London’s most famous newspaper editor is doing editing a travel mag (Condé Nast Traveler launched in September 1987). But Harry never thinks about status, only about what excellence he can make out of whatever he’s handed. The new job and its potential is what occupies him already. He started drawing the layout of an eight-page exposé of unsafe airlines on the paper napkin.

  Wednesday, August 27, 1986

  I finished working on the Dalí spreads with Alex, who was at his expansive best, and lunched with our new young fashion stylist, twenty-three-year-old Joe McKenna, who just arrived from London. He’s very original—a bony nose, thin, freckled face, and black trilby on the side of his head. He reminds me of the characters in the current indie hit My Beautiful Laundrette. Joe is quintessential London now, and yet I can also imagine him shooting to fame back in the sixties, when the world suddenly opened up to pop culture. I think he will be a star.

  He’s found an apartment here and applied for a visa and is engagingly thrilled with his desk stuck out in the corridor. With Joe, Miles, Sarah Giles, and Chris Garrett now at VF, we are creating a bit of a Brit talent diaspora in the magazine world. I admire their willingness to join me in NYC, their flight from coziness, familiarity, and old friendships to make a stand somewhere new and tap into something more exciting, yes, but also harder and colder and less accessible than what they already know. And that, of course, is what makes them good.

  Sunday, August 31, 1986

  Quogue

  Heavenly Labor Day weekend. The days have the burnt glow of summer’s end, the evenings the cold edge of fall. We lit a fire and the smell of wood smoke added to the delicious melancholy sense that one season has ended and another begun, the going-back-to-school feeling of I must try harder! We’ve had a perfect time with Georgie. He’s not crawling yet and the pediatrician says he ought to be. Still bottom shuffling along the deck, which worries us. Hoping the physical therapy will get him there soon.

  The waspish Times Style reporter John Duka tried to suppress our piece on Halston by Steve Gaines because he, Duka, is under contract with Random House to do a book on Halston and he thought our piece would be a spoiler. Unfortunately Duka and Gaines share the same agent, John Hawkins, who called Howard Kaminsky at Random House to use his influence with Si to try to get our piece stopped! Then when that failed, Duka called Si himself. Priceless Si immediately called down to ask me what it was all about. I told him that Duka had ripped off my idea to write about Halston (I had approached him first before Gaines) and he sold the idea instead to Random House as a book. I asked Si what he would say if he heard from Kaminsky. “I don’t think I will hear,” he replied after a brief laugh. “And anyway, I’d prefer not to have anything to do with it. You should go right on and act as separate companies.” Actually I think he loves it when his executives vie over material.

  Anyway, this plus the still-buzzing Sally Quinn fiasco made me take the bull by the horns about Bob’s takedown on John-Roger in VF and call Arianna to warn her. She, of course, handled it with much more elegance than I would while professing “hurt” that it could appear in a mag edited by me. I did defuse it by calling her. A lesson well learned. I’d hate to lose her as a friend. Her heart is big, even if her ideas sometimes wacky. I should ask Clay Felker how he dealt with all this at New York mag when he did so many razor pieces about the society he moved in.

  We saw the Clurmans last night. Dick thinks the flak I am getting is funny and inevitable for a good magazine. “Just pursue what’s real, Tina,” he said, which I found comforting.

  Monday, September 8, 1986

  Motherhood! It gives me brain fade when I have spent a few days retreated into playtime with G. His new fave thing is to loll across my body on the single bed in Harry’s den, nibbling my nose and panting like a little hot puppy. Occasionally he throws his head back and stares long and unflinchingly into my eyes, an exchange of pure love. We took him with us to a little drinks party hosted by Mrs. Hamish Maxwell, whose husband is a Philip Morris exec and is nominating us to the Quogue Field Club. Very WASPy crowd. We always look such a wreck on the weekends; Harry had his shirt hanging out and I was wearing some old cheesecloth wardrobe holdover, and clearly this snooty bunch are a floral-sundress-and-cherry-trousers crowd. But the club has wonderful swings and a tennis club and a kids’ summer camp I know we will want. G was on his best behavior and charmed all with his instantaneously sunny smile.

  I struggle through a few administrative goals as if through a mist. I am a cultural zombie, so locked in my Golden Books that I have zero clue what’s on at the theater, the movies, what books I should read. Tonight on the way back to the city in the car I played a tape of Philip Larkin’s poems, which thrilled me and chilled me and got my brain working again. “An Arundel Tomb”: “Above their scrap of history, / Only an attitude remains.”

  Harry started with Condé Nast on Tuesday at Traveler. It was lovely and strange to have him there on the sixth floor.

  Thursday, September 11, 1986

  Went to Malcolm Forbes’s birthday on board his party yacht The Highlander. First regroup of power people after the summer and it was interesting to see them all refreshed from their Hamptons and Mediterranean renewal sojourns, women thinned down and younger, achieved in secret weeks at spas and clinics, men shiny and complacent from planning takeovers by the pool. As we purred down the Hudson River in Malcolm’s pale mahogany floating crib, billions of dollars stroked each other’s egos over lobster and champagne. There was the fleshy-faced Larry Tisch, who just captured CBS, with Bill Paley (temporarily no doubt) back at the helm. Barbara Walters (younger, in mailbox red), with Merv Adelson (richer, or behaving as if he is), Betsy Bloomingdale, sinuous and watchful with her tiny rich eyes and staccato shoulders, Pat Buckley, big-boned and noisier, Jim Hoge (handsomer) with Sharon (fraughter), David and Helen (Gurley) Brown (drunker), wearing a scarlet feather boa (her own interpretation of Reagan red?). Architectural Digest editor Paige Rense, squat and intractable, stalking rich people’s houses. Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall—I’ve never seen them together and always found her off-puttingly trashy, but tonight I could see her appeal. The powdered pallor and long sliver of gold hair cascading over a black spaghetti-strapped evening gown with flashes of silver were extraordinarily effective. Mick in real life was also a surprise. He sat on Fran Lebowitz’s knee, singing “Happy Birthday, Dear Malcolm” in that insanely famous croak. Being photographed so much, I am convinced, changes your actual face. There is a layer of legend to get through before you can pinpoint or believe in the familiar asymmetries of flesh. Standing together against the night skyline, Mick and Jerry looked like Satyricon creatures at a Venetian carnival with a whiff of decadence you only see as you get close.

  Realize I am making it sound like a horrible party when it was actually an exceptionally good one. Perhaps I am overmelodramatic when I get these frissons of corrupt undercurrents, and not sure where I get my deeply moralizing instinct from or whether I should trust it. There were delicious moments such as when Malcolm’s son, Steve, landed on the boat in a helicopter. We all went onto the upper deck to watch it come in, our hair whipped by its landing. The propellers whirled dangerously. “You go first,” Harry said to Murdoch, and Rupert laughed. Malcolm’s speech was very funny. “When my kids said we should all gather in the saloon, I thought, holy crow, it’s a takeover, and I got on my satellite phone to c
heck with my lawyer that I still owned the shares I thought I did!”

  We’ve seen a dream apartment we want to buy desperately. Just off Sutton Place on Fifty-Seventh Street, $917,000, a crazy price but oh so beautiful, with high ceilings and gracious square rooms and a kitchen you can eat in. It’s on the third floor of a 1929 building looking out over the art deco facade of Sutton Place and the wide corner where East Fifty-Seventh Street meets the East River. The apartment has only had one owner, a lady who lived to be ninety-nine, tended in her last years by a daughter in her seventies. Mercifully, it has therefore escaped modernization. The wood-block floors and the porcelain plumbing are all intact. What I love most are the big sash windows at the same level as the plane trees outside and the spaciousness of the eight high-ceilinged rooms. They flow into each other in a way that feels reassuringly European. After living in the shiny pornography apartment in the Solow tower, an aerial cigar box run by a mafia don on Central Park South and now on the faceless East Fifty-Sixth Street block with the Hollywood fountains, I am done with my modern experiments in living. Here when I look out the window and see a tiny park bustling with babies like mine, I know this could really be home at last. Now the chase to raise the money begins. Manhattan is the city of never-satisfied desire, but I want want want this beautiful apartment for the three of us.

  Monday, September 15, 1986

  Fall madness descends! My eyes burn with the stress of a day that begins at six, doing crunches with the thunder-thighed trainer, followed by an hour gurgling with G, an hour blowing out hair and getting dressed for the office, and then it’s race race race to get through the day and home by five to walk G in his stroller and play with him (it’s so damn tough to make the power woman–to–mommy switch), then on to his bath time and dosh up for one of the innumerable place-card dinners raining down.

  Tonight was hosted by the socialite Louise Melhado and Henry Grunwald, now a couple, in a newly decorated Park Avenue apartment. The apartment is so freshly done, the cream carpet felt stiff and the chocolate-brown dining room gleamed with a disco shine. Henry, in his last year as a pooh-bah at Time Inc., where he was managing editor for so long, has become portly and somnolent in the recesses of his cigar. He was a subliminal host, if there is such a thing, perhaps not wholly at ease with the bargain he is striking with an elegant society woman to commandeer his creature comforts.

  Harry and I were the first guests, unfortunately, because the second was the ballet legend and cultural impresario Lincoln Kirstein. In my first weeks on the VF job I stupidly rejected a piece inherited from Leo that Lincoln wrote about the New York City Ballet when I had not a clue who he was or that he actually founded it and nurtured Balanchine. The piece wasn’t very good—typical of that period when great bylines gave VF their worst pieces—but it was pretty disrespectful of me to just toss it out with a perfunctory note. And I think he was so furious that there is no mending of it. His high nose and manic eyes give him the air of a haughty camel or the figurehead of a ship. He was immediately extremely difficult with me, repelling questions with knowing and contrary answers. With astonishing rudeness to our hosts he said to Harry, “Look at all these brand-new books! Pure set decoration for a woman who never reads.” I went to recuperate in the powder room from all the social tension and on the way there ran into Henry and Louise pursuing Kirstein down the corridor.

  “Is he leaving?” Henry was saying. “He’s always doing this,” Louise hissed back. And looking through the open front door, I now caught sight of Kirstein waiting for the elevator, wearing a festive expression and giving a little insouciant wave as the doors opened and he disappeared off into the night before dinner was even served. I understand how he felt. If I was eighty I might also feel time is too short to be constrained by social form when you have decided the evening ahead will only yield pretension and a woman next to you one really doesn’t want (in this case, me).

  “You’ve just lost your dinner partner,” Henry told me, much to my relief. Instead I sat next to Louise, whom I enjoyed so much more.

  Tuesday September 16, 1986

  Our dream apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street is becoming a reality. Si came through with a three-hundred-thousand-dollar loan as soon as I asked if he would consider it. I’m so grateful to him. I asked Nick Dunne for the name of a decorator and he suggested the former set designer who did his apartment so well, Chester Cleaver. He sounds perfect, because the last thing I want is some swanky taste baron who expects a million-dollar budget and the license to throw out all the furniture we have sitting in storage in London. I know exactly what I want, but would have no idea how to achieve it myself. My dream house remains Tony Lambton’s in Siena. I want that casual, eclectic English charm with a dash of Visconti in its colors and hope this Chester guy can deliver it.

  I’ve appointed Bob Hughes as VF food writer. Reinaldo is back from Caracas and is in full cry, organizing Spanish duchesses to dance the flamenco for our April issue. He is still hell-bent on getting us Michele Duvalier in exile for a profile. Her excesses will make a big, fat cover story for us if he pulls it off.

  Monday, September 22, 1986

  The effort of being superwoman is killing me. I was half-dead today after a weekend of agonizing transatlantic organization, getting ready for the sale of Brasted to underwrite the new apartment, and trying to plan a Christmas in London at Ponsonby Terrace with Mum and Dad between rentals because I just can’t stand another characterless Christmas at a resort, and G needs his first English Christmas.

  Today we did the Hall of Fame captions with Schiff, Miles, and Wolcott. Wolcott as always displaying his flashes of genius that mark him out. It was the usual scene of squashed Tab cans, Styrofoam cups, peach stones, apple cores, and cookie crumbs as we toiled over frantic alliterations. “Boris Becker. Because he’s the sultan of serve, the kaiser of the court, the führer of forehand.”

  Miles: “The Nazi of the net…”

  Me: “That’s awful, Miles, and not sexy. Boris is sexy.”

  Schiff: “Because he’s boom-boom Boris with a wiggle in his walk and…” (collapse of working group).

  And so it went on. Tonight, Harry and I went to deposit the Brasted sale check into Citibank and plotted frantically how to con the 455 East Fifty-Seventh Street co-op board into thinking we have a vast bank account to support us taking the apartment. Everything in this city is about conspiring to keep everyone out except the superrich.

  Friday, September 26, 1986

  I defied a soaring temperature and went to a reception for Leonard Lauder, who was receiving the Order of Merit from the French government. I knew this occasion would draw all the advertisers and was right, so I hollowed out my ashen face with blusher, put on my skintight black two-piece, and hit the French consulate. I was set upon by every top retailer in NYC, showering plaudits on VF! Bill Ruben, the boss of Bonwit, Ira Neimark of Bergdorf’s, Melvin Jacobs of Saks, Carol Phillips of Clinique. It was such a high after all the work, but I am dying to register all the praise as PROFIT.

  Then lurking in a corner, I saw Si, who had put in a call to me that morning. “I’m sorry I missed you,” I said.

  “I was just calling to say how wonderfully it all seems to be going,” he said.

  “I should miss such a phone call!” I laughed. “No, really,” he said. And just then one of the retailers butted in and started to bang on about the glories of VF and Si just glowed happily. It was raining. “Let me give you a lift back,” he said. I was happy with this unexpected treat of five minutes in the car with Si on his own. “Success,” he said, settling into the shadows, “is mysterious. But I have learned not to question it when it arrives. Everyone … is talking about Vanity Fair.”

  “I wish we could convert the talk into advertising dollars,” I said. “We will,” he said. “They’re taking notice.” We fell to talking about the other new mags that have started lately and he said what a pleasure it was now working with Harry at Traveler. “Where are you living these days?” he sa
id, vaguely, as we approached my building. He had clearly forgotten he had just given me a three-hundred-thousand-dollar loan for Apartment IB, 455 East Fifty-Seventh Street. He got out of the car and walked me to my door, still glowing with secretive delight, and gave me a clumsy peck on the cheek when we reached the entrance.

  There was something deeply touching about this encounter. I am so headlong, so driven, it’s rare I allow myself to savor things in the here and now. Somehow I was reminded of a night five years ago just before Christmas when I had put Tatler to bed with Nick Coleridge and Miles and Gabé and walked down Piccadilly alone, delighting in the merry Christmas lights with a full heart.

  What a pleasure collaborating can be. How much people miss out on by not working toward a common goal with a few close, believing colleagues.

  Tonight the whole world dances at Barbara Walters’s wedding party. I am fed up that I am unwell and in bed but maybe not. Lately I have found the competitive dressing and the rich gossip too much. I am sick of them all.

  I had lunch last week with Ralph Lauren. We got on exceedingly well. He’s more impressive when you drill deeper, with a shrewd, strategic mind. He tells me that he never goes to parties for the same reason they have palled so much for me. “Cut it out. It will kill you,” said Ralph.

  But I never will.

  When we have our apartment on Fifty-Seventh I want to entertain in my own way! Not dinners where only the rich occupy the chairs like lead balloons. I want one Falstaff for every Hal, one pauper for every billionaire, one young Turk for every legendary old sacred cow.

 

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