by Tina Brown
Friday, December 26, 1986
25 Ponsonby Terrrace, London
How unreal and nice it is to be back in this house where we haven’t lived for three years! When I pause to turn my key in the lock and look back at the neat, white Regency houses with the railings in front and the secret lives of MPs inside, I feel the sense of walking out of one era and back into another.
I remember so well the last weeks of living here. The small bedroom on the third floor that had become my miniature office adorned with blown-up Tatler covers. Through the high window as I sat at my desk I could see the decaying cavern of the torn-down buildings below that marked the start of the “Crown improvements” behind Ponsonby Terrace. Incredibly, three years later, very little has changed, and the work and demolished buildings behind are still at the foundation stage, reminder of one of the maddening differences between England and America. In New York that building site would have long since become new apartments teeming with business action in the streets. Or Donald Trump would have taken it over and overcharged the city to turn it into a skating rink.
1987
SHAKE, RATTLE, AND ROLL
Saturday, January 3, 1987
Return to New York and suddenly feel the stark difference between rich and poor. There’s a growing army of the homeless living on the streets. I see them propped up in doorways, lying half-conscious over gratings when I wheel Georgie down Fifty-Seventh Street in his stroller to the Palace Diner. Whatever the Reagan administration promised was supposed to “trickle down” hasn’t. The hopelessness is such a contrast to the flash and shine of Condé Nast’s world. Some of the new homeless aren’t like others. They are New York’s own version of Bombay’s lepers: hollow eyed, hollowed out, on their way to the next world before they’ve entirely left this one. They are the AIDS sufferers, the ones who can’t afford to hide and go quietly. Everyone in the universe of New York culture has friends who suddenly start to fade, whose paths have been horrifyingly diverted. I seem to always be at funerals. In December a dancer’s death was reported every single day in one week, each with the same melancholy indicators—death at an early age after an unnamed illness, with parents and siblings listed as survivors.
I assigned a piece for the March issue on the toll of AIDS on the arts and fashion. No one has yet gathered up a gallery of faces of all those who have died and denuded us of their talent, and we have done it in a haunting double-page spread. I asked our new hire Michael Shnayerson, who was the editor of Avenue, to report it out. He’s a young straight guy who lives in the West Village and who until this assignment was oblivious to AIDS. Now, reporting the piece, he says it’s been like stepping into a war zone. He has done a slew of interviews with artists and arts leaders like Joe Papp who see the toll growing every day, and the doctors who recount stories from the front. Papp’s tears rolled down his cheeks unabated as he talked to Michael about the loss. The most moving interview in the piece is with the makeup artist Way Bandy’s lover, Maury Hopson, describing Way’s last days. How dignified he was, how brave. “I mean, here was this person who was a makeup artist you might think would be some big sissy,” Maury said. “And he went out like a fucking lion.” It made me cry.
The piece has given me a chance in the editor’s letter to write about the death of Henry Post at Tatler. My shock when I visited him in New York–Presbyterian in the summer of 1982, his blond hair shaved off, his restless eyes raking the ward as if for explanation. “Your fashionable correspondent is dying of the fashionable disease,” he said. Flippant to the last.
Collecting the pictures of the people who have died has been a real challenge. So many were in the closet or didn’t want anyone to know they died from AIDS, or had hidden it from their families. Is it appropriate to run these pictures? We are going over each picture case by case, phone call by phone call. One difficult one has been Angelo Donghia, the interior decorator who died at fifty and never admitted what was wrong. Some of his business associates argued we should exclude his picture. But then the photo department reached a close friend of his who saw a lot of Donghia at the end. The friend was disturbed by the idea of including Angelo’s face at first, but then called back and said he believed it was time to go public. “Angelo lived with his secret for two years,” he said. “If only all of us had known, we could have nurtured him more and spared him, at least, a sense of shame.”
I have wanted to do this piece for so long and feel at last I did something for Henry.
Sunday, January 11, 1987
Miles just called with a newsflash. Bob Gottlieb has been appointed editor of The New Yorker. It’s been long rumored, but as always with Si, its timing was a total surprise. I wonder how he will set about it, and what it will mean for VF—absorb Si’s attention more for a start. I hope Gottlieb doesn’t go after Wolcott or Schiff. I would, if I were he. I am relieved to hear from Miles that Sharon doesn’t get on with him, as she is the one editor I would be fearful of losing. In real terms his impact won’t be felt for a while. I think Gottlieb will be superb for content, but I wonder how fast he will master magazine technique and effect all the format changes it requires. The New Yorker needs a refreshed layout, cover lines, more vibrant cover illustrations, blurbs introducing the stories, the introduction of photography, and shorter pieces to vary the length and tone. And a contents page! Just for a start. What I am not sure of is how reverential Gottlieb is of the magazine’s look, because that’s one thing that really needs to evolve. But then again, perhaps if he sharpens the content, readers can grit their teeth and hew their way through the density of the layout. Hmm.
Friday, January 23, 1987
Newsflash two. Doug Johnston just called to tell me Shawn didn’t resign, he was fired. That Steve Florio said he’d been obstructive and was planning a successor who wasn’t Gottlieb. Wow. That must have been tough for Si (not to mention tough for Shawn!). One of the most difficult scenes of Si’s life, because he actually worshipped Shawn’s New Yorker. His ability to flip chills the blood.
* * *
My life is so crazy, trying to juggle between the hunt for a nanny (Joanne moved on, other fish to fry), the pending move, G up four times a night. Harry has gone to Orlando to make a speech and G is asleep right now, which is a heady window of freedom that feels like a spa trip.
We had one of the daft roundtables with the ad department today about how hard they find it to sell VF. I am sick of hearing about how hard it is when there is such heat on the edit side. After three years it seems advertisers still don’t know if we are a movie mag, a fashion mag, or a general-interest mag. Why should it matter?
Then I came down and stared morosely at seven different Molly Ringwald covers, trying to force my gut to choose one when I know none of them work. I took the best three down to the newsstand in the lobby and put them out among the commercial cacophony of faces and they all looked ineffably dreary.
In the middle of this, Peter Armour called me down from the circulation department and told me the February newsstand figures and just as I predicted at the time, the Debra Winger sales were a disappointment after the gains made by the Madonna cover, which was up 52,000 over the month before. I was right after all about that goddamn bathrobe picture of Winger, and no amount of jazzy type could make it appealing. It proves the irksome point that when I don’t like something the readers usually agree with me. But sometimes there is no good alternative.
I sat down with Joe McKenna, Ruth, Charles, and Jane to do a postmortem of what went wrong on the Molly shoot so we can avoid it happening again and talk about why I felt it was about to be another turkey. I had told Ruth and Charles repeatedly: no Molly-just-standing-there-in-a-gust-from-a-wind-machine, please. So what do they do? Stand her there with a wind machine going, and let her gaze disconsolately out at us, wearing a dull black T dress and brown leather jacket. Nothing makes me more irritated than the art department telling me I don’t understand how cool it really is and bombarding me with comments like “This skimpy sixties t
hing is where it’s at now!” “But it’s BORING,” I insist. “Nothing is going ON in this picture.” I pointed to the simplicity of the Herb Ritts cover of Jack Nicholson pushing sunglasses up the bridge of his nose, a small nuance that nonetheless suggested attitude. At which Ruth goes into her maddening offloading of responsibility onto Charles and Jane and Patrick Demarchelier (whose picture Molly is). I got home feeling cranky and thwarted and read about the scandal of the former (and first Jewish) Miss America Bess Myerson, caught up in a city bribery scandal to help out her lover, a married sewer contractor. That’s a real story, perfect for Marie Brenner’s zesty city insights. Maybe we should slap Bess on the cover instead.
I had lunch with Jean Stein, the heiress daughter of Jules Stein, to ask her how to crack the endless Warren Beatty tease, as they are close friends. She seemed a bit of a professional basket case, fluttering around in sixties disarray, exuding the recreational neuroses of the rich. Still, she seemed likable and might help. She said we should do it like her great Edie book [about the doomed Warhol superstar star Edie Sedgwick] as oral history but had to “find someone who would amuse Warren.”
Today Isabelle Adjani stood up André Leon Talley at a shoot in Paris, so another cover bites the dust. I have now been told by Jane, who had it from the PR that Molly looked dreary because “she had stomach cramps.” Stars are so damn ridiculous. That’s one thing Bob Gottlieb doesn’t have to deal with at The New Yorker. I long to just be able to think about the writing and the stories. One treat—our Dennis Hopper cover for April is wonderful. I wish Annie could do everything. She’s caught the sly, wicked gleam in his eye as he looks out in semiprofile, a cigar burning between his fingers, the glimpse of a floppy black tie suggesting a loose-moraled night out. Ron Rosenbaum’s profile of him is juicy. Newsstands need bad boys and women with a past, not drippy starlets with pious causes. The Joe Orton diaries inside are compulsive. The March issue, on the other hand, is way too artsy-craftsy. It’s funny how issues develop their own personalities and mix. April, fiercely meaty; March, airily bohemian. The endless conundrum of how to get the mix perfect is what keeps me from getting bored. It’s snowing and I have a passel of photographers out and about, trying to capture it for the next Christmas issue so we don’t have to send them abroad.
Si hired the Indian publishing pasha Sonny Mehta from London to replace Gottlieb at Knopf. Clever appointment and one that’s genial for us, as he and his wife, Gita, are already well disposed to Harry and me. Howard Kaminsky, for all his relentless bonhomie, has been getting too overbearing at Random House, very much exerting sway over Si. He is starting to replace Roy Cohn in Si’s life. Si is a gangster of wishful thinking, always excited by the presence of swagger.
Tuesday, February 24, 1987
In flight, Chicago to New York
On the way back with the team from the opening of The Art of Vanity Fair show at Marshall Field’s in Chicago, a great school outing. The show featured Steichen, Covarrubias, and Calder from the golden days, and Annie, the illustrator Robert Risko, and co from now. After the show reception, Philip Miller, aka the Robert Redford of Retail and the boss of Marshall Field’s, hosted a three-table dinner party at the Racquet Club.
The obsession with shopping is one of the big differences between American and British women. Maureen Smith, a big, loud powerhouse lady who referred to a rich friend’s first husband as her “starter” husband, was vocal on the subject. “You’ve heard the expression shop till you drop?” she shouted. “Well, that’s me. I spend a hundred bucks just getting to the elevator.”
“Me too,” said Miller. “I’ve read somewhere that it’s all about a need to control. That we have to own to get power.”
“You’re reading the wrong books,” another of the Chicago ladies said. “It’s all about sex.” And then we were off on why.
One thing I have learned is that the American compulsion to shop has nothing to do with having money. G’s nanny Joanne couldn’t leave the apartment without coming back loaded with merchandise, fired up with the illusion of “the bargain” that had made her spend the day pounding the streets of Queens. And at the other end of the scale is André Leon Talley, also madly questing a bargain but from very different stores. “Eighty-nine bucks, the topcoats in the I. Magnin sale,” he shouts. “Adeney Brigg, same coat, five hundred!” What is this all about? Is the frenzy of acquisition a way to make up for the lack of history? Am going to assign an essay to explore it.
I decided I really like Chicago as a city. There is a structured, spacious feel to it, the sense of a forceful, virile past refusing to be swept aside by the less substantial present. There’s also a big-time gusto, a sense of high stakes, and anything goes. So much less cautious than life in New York’s petri dish, incubating viral successes and disasters. The TV anchorman Walter Jacobson, who interviewed us on his show, was better than anything on network TV. He had a great reckless spirit, impatient, risky, contrary, and real. “You’ve had enough airtime, powder puff,” he suddenly yelled at a mayoral candidate who was blathering into the mike. Not for the first time, apparently. In 1983, I am told, he famously criticized Mayor Harold Washington for using city workers to paint and redecorate his apartment. Washington retaliated at a television academy luncheon, shouting, “Walter, you’re the bottom of the barrel.”
I could definitely live in Chicago.
Thursday, February 26, 1987
455 East Fifty-Seventh Street
We are here! In the apartment we have dreamed and schemed and screamed for! It’s still awash with painters and missing bits, every room a turmoil, but the warm, comfortable glow of it still shines through and captivates me with a sense of HOME AT LAST. I marvel to be living in such a place on a block that is so secluded and so unbroken by modernity that it feels like a slice of Pimlico or Paris.
Armed with my Visconti–cum–Tony Lambton decor brief, Chester suggested each room should be a different color. He found some heavenly round-backed armchairs covered in dark green damask and a chintz sofa, and laid sisal on the floor. We’ve turned the little room off the dining room into a den for me, with a tapestry-covered Turkish bed flanked by brass reading lights where I can lie in the evening with my hookah, reading manuscripts, lulled by the rotation of a wood-bladed ceiling fan.
But the real joy of the dining room is that it doubles as a library, the walls filled with our fifty cartons of books from London. Harry and I unpacked them ravenously, thumbing through our joyful old favorites as if they were long-lost friends. We spent the weekend hanging pictures with Chester. I came to realize that when he didn’t like something he would say, with a nervous laugh, “This one would look great in Quogue.” Our accumulated memorabilia is so eclectic that there’s no point making sense of it, so we are playing up the differences with interesting juxtapositions: one wall in the living room features an oil painting of the Venetian countryside next to a scarlet pop-art caricature of me by Robert Risko, next to a gilt girandole mirror next to the sepia Lartigue. I love the way Chester shows up in his L.L.Bean rain shoes and cashmere overcoat, carrying a bag of coffee and bagels in one hand and three lavatory seats in the other.
We ate a delicious picnic when we had finished, sent over from Balducci’s by Marie Brenner.
Saturday, February 28, 1987
Hectic few days. Andy Warhol died on Sunday and it cried out for an electric VF package. At first, I tried to crash it into the lackluster June issue, but then everyone rebelled and we decided to do it big and properly for July. This afternoon, we sat around and hashed out the angles, with Bob Colacello on speakerphone in Gstaad. I had to lace my soothing condolences to Bob about the passing of his old mentor with the gentle but firm insistence that he write the “Behind the Mask” piece about Andy, because after all those years at the Factory, no one knew him better. John Richardson, meanwhile, said he would write the piece about Andy’s voyeur energy, and Sarah Giles would get from his longtime business manager, promoter, and sidekick, Fred Hughes, the exclusive
pictures of Andy’s house and his last portrait. Fred has been named his sole executor, which perhaps disappointed Colacello. He’s a cool customer, Fred, all slicked-back hair and invented pedigree. Richardson voiced the view that Warhol was a kind of saint, living a spinsterish existence, attending morning mass inside the whirlpool of weirdness around him. I couldn’t let him get away with this notion, attractively counterintuitive though it may be as an editorial angle. I firmly believe that Warhol, along with Roy Cohn, was one of the two most amoral men of our times. Cohen was actively destructive, Warhol was the manipulative void, the dead star. Carolina Herrera told me that Andy was terrified of death and never attended a funeral his whole life (except his own in Pittsburgh tomorrow, along with the two perfectly normal middle-class brothers who’ve suddenly stepped out of the shadows to claim him).
Anyhow, I realize if we are to have Fred Hughes’s cooperation, we can’t portray Andy as the satanic figure I believe him to be, but we still have to suggest there was a dark side. John Richardson still says no, no, Fred Hughes totally cleaned up the Factory, and all the junkies who died around Andy were just an inevitable part of the “sixties scene,” which I believe is pure sophistry. Andy was a devouring maw that had to be fed with decadence. Anyway. It’s all very interesting and the debate was long and heated around my desk.