by Tina Brown
Wednesday, March 11, 1987
The Warhol package has turned out great. It was such a sweat to reel it in—took so much planning, wheedling, hustling, and pushing. The dramas raged for two weeks. Sarah and Reinaldo persuaded Fred Hughes to let us photograph Andy’s house, which has never been seen. Then it was nearly snatched away by House & Garden. Lou Gropp, its sleepy editor, suddenly woke up and thought the Warhol house would drop into his lap out of droit du seigneur. Gropp wrote a letter to Fred Hughes that made him go wobbly about giving the exclusive to VF, and then, worse, told John Richardson that as part of his House & Garden contract he expected him to help him get it. Richardson, never Richard the Lionheart at the best of times, instead of fessing up and saying he was already writing it for us, got into a cowardly panic about his House & Garden contract and started blathering about how he could do both pieces and would indeed “raise it with Fred Hughes.” What? I nearly had a heart attack. Sarah G had been sweet-talking Hughes at Nell’s every night of the week to get this scoop. Richardson only got in on the act later, though having his name on it clearly helped. I sent John a stiff letter reminding him who was first in this story chase and Sarah, meanwhile, gate-crashed his à deux lunch with Fred Hughes to make quite sure John didn’t mention House and Garden’s interest to Fred. So we managed to bag it. As I write, unbeknownst to Lou Gropp, who thinks we are all still discussing it, Evelyn Hofer is taking the pictures of Andy’s house. As soon as the shoot is in our hot little hands, I will have to break it to Gropp. But that’s showbiz, Lou. A scoop is a scoop.
Monday, March 23, 1987
I am playing hooky from the office and writing my editor’s letter at home, with G playing happily next door. I am also waiting for the imminent delivery of Alex Shoumatoff’s report of the trial in the Palais de Justice in Bangui of the Central African Republic’s monstrous former emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa—whose résumé includes the newsstand-friendly detail that he used to keep his enemies’ corpses in his walk-in refrigerator. There is so little foreign feature writing in the US compared to London, and yet whenever we do such pieces there is a real audience for them. We have been trying to get a writer to Bangui for three months, then with ten days till the close of the June issue I at last got Shoumatoff to agree and crash it through. Three years ago I knew so few writers here, I would never know whom to reach for to do an ambitious story like this on deadline. But now the team plays their assigned roles so well. Sarah G hustling through the visa, Sharon waiting like a bulldog for the receipt of the rough copy she will wrestle into coherent shape, batting it back and forth to me for direction. Every issue this year has had at least one juicy, deeply reported narrative. With Sarah, Jane, Sharon, Elisabeth Biondi, we have the A-list writers’ support team—without them we could never get the scoops or the access and the writers and photographers would fall through the cracks. It’s a different system from that at most magazines, having people to help facilitate the writers, but it really works. I feel my professional life has never been more joyously productive. Over the weekend Chester said, “I’ve done a sketch of a little redesign of the nanny’s area to create a tiny extra room in case Georgie has a sister.” Dare I? The wail next door signifies that G again burrowed into the saucepan closet and fell on a frying pan. I love him so much I want to burst. Could there possibly be room in our hearts for two?
Wednesday, April 1, 1987
Wednesday was the PEN gala at the Metropolitan Club I vice-chaired with Gayfryd because Norman Mailer asked me to. Gayfryd had created decor that was totally over the top, with outsize flower arrangements you had to peer through like something out of The Jungle Book. She was wearing a shiny white satin gown with huge puffy leg o’ mutton sleeves. The evening was fraught with comical seating disasters. I had invited Bob Hughes, John Richardson, DVF and Alain Elkann, Caroline Graham, and Jay McInerney to sit at my table, with the PEN host, Arthur Miller. The first crisis was Calvin Klein’s assistant calling to say he had bought a ticket for the dinner but would come only if he sat at my table. I asked PEN if Miller could be moved to host another table, thus displacing America’s greatest living playwright, which was hardly the spirit of the night. Worse followed. Carolina Herrera, for some reason, thought I had asked her and she turned up with Jerry Zipkin, only to discover, of course, there was no table allocation. Gayfryd and I had a heated powwow and I said I would ask Caroline to take one for the team and move off to an absentee slot, but where to find a place for Jay McInerney so we could seat Zipkin, whose poison if he had nowhere to sit was just too scary to contemplate? Jane Yeoman of PEN valiantly agreed to float until a seat came up and Jay was put at ITT CEO Rand Araskog’s grand, dreary table, which didn’t please Jay at all. All this switching meant that the balance of mine was now all thrown off and Bob Hughes was amazed to find his fellow PEN authors were Calvin Klein, Jerry Zipkin, Carolina Herrera, Jackie Rogers, and DVF. The Frocky Horror Show, from Bob’s point of view.
* * *
Harry got into an altercation with the New Yorker fiction writer Jamaica Kincaid, who came over to Gayfryd and with an air of hoity-toity bemusement said, “I am puzzled by this event. Why are there so many rich people here?” (Because writers are the cheapest people in the world and don’t care about other writers, so PEN has to be funded by rich people who don’t care about writers either but at least are willing to pay for a dinner, Jamaica, that’s why.) She’d had a bad evening because she sat next to Mort Janklow who told her that The New Yorker had never had an editor until now, which, given that Jamaica is married to Shawn’s other son, Allen, didn’t go over well. She also told Mort that she would never write for Vanity Fair because of the despicable way Si treated Shawn. What a cauldron of hot feuds.
Everyone was talking about Andy Warhol’s memorial service. Two thousand people at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was like paging through back issues of Interview over the decades—Halston, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bass, Claus von Bülow, Grace Jones, Yoko Ono, Tom Wolfe, Richard Gere, Prince Michael of Greece and his wife, Marina.
John Richardson got his opportunity to promote his Andy-as-saint angle, this time in the right setting at least, telling the crowd that Andy “fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame, and glamour, and that he was cool to the point of callousness.” But (here we go) he was, in fact, “more of a recording angel—the distance he established between the world and himself was above all a matter of innocence and of art.” I still don’t buy it, but the massive turnout of fashion, art, writing, and society was pretty extraordinary. Bianca Jagger looked so pretty and distressed in her little black hat. André Leon Talley was there in a bespoke suit as thin as a number two lead pencil with the young Brit fashion assistant Isabella Blow, wearing a couture suit and crazy hat. I couldn’t quite take Claus von Bülow going up for communion, but it was full of vignettes in that genre. Andy would have loved it, there is no doubt about that.
Sunday, April 5, 1987
Spa break at the amazing Golden Door—I came with Ruth Ansel. It’s unlike anything I have ever experienced at most other boring, airhead spas … a slice of Bel Air in the mountains, and the joy is the way they tailor everything to you personally, bringing exactly the right calorie amount for you by the pool. I particularly love the six a.m. hikes and the tiny muffins and coffee that await us, prehike, in the Wisteria Lounge. I chortled on the flight to San Diego at Bob Hughes’s hysterical piece in Time about the van Gogh auction that last week netted $39 million for Sunflowers, which Bob called “the Mona Lisa of the vegetable world.” I did have a sick moment on arrival at the Door when I spied Park Avenue faces I know under sun hats, but they were also fleeing the city and melted away. Also sighted the extremely irritating New Yorker fashion writer, Kennedy Fraser, clearly basking in a freebie, going on about how appalling it was that Shawn had been removed. I said, given how advertisers were fleeing and readers averaging over sixty, what did she think the owner should do? “I really don’t know,” she exhaled, “except that h
e must understand that The New Yorker is a writer’s magazine. We write about the things that interest us and what worries me about Gottlieb is he’s assigning things. Mr. Shawn never assigned.” Please! Surely what The New Yorker needs to be is not just a “writer’s magazine” but a reader’s magazine, because writers, unless guided and edited and lured out of their comfort zones, can go off-piste into dreary cul-de-sacs of introversion and excess and entirely forget about questions of content and pace.
Saturday, April 11, 1987
Came home a day early as I missed G too much to be apart anymore, but had a horrible stress attack on being back. Unless I am working, I am agitated. Hoped that the Golden Door would calm me down but the contrast makes me worse. I am hopeless with yoga; tried it at the Door and my head was always just full of articles I wanted to assign. I had a session with a maternal, milky-skinned woman named Anne-Harriet who is the Door’s lifestyle therapist and she started by asking solicitously, “Is there a lot of stress in your life?” to which I could only laugh mirthlessly. But the stress is also self-inflicted and an addiction, and such remedies as breathing deeply and holding on to some smooth, spiritually imbued stone doesn’t seem to work for me, folks. I am a vertical obsessive, unable to let go of any detail, not always the best thing for the mag. It ought to sort of run itself by now, but each issue also has its own unique requirement for one last thing to reach perfection and I always feel it’s my job to search it out. Groan.
April 18, 1987
Came down with G and opened the house in Quogue. Glum weather but agita soon fled.
* * *
There has been a swirl of welcome to New York parties for Bernie Leser, who arrived from London Condé Nast. Yep, good old Bernie has fetched up in the Big Apple, having been made president of US Condé Nast to replace burly Bob Lapham, who has retired. I realize that Bernie, who was never a big player in London, where corporate titles don’t mean much, could wind up as a hot ticket here with the status badge of president of CNP. And why not? He is much less preposterous than Carl Spielvogel, who looks like a pear with a permanent wave. He is more agreeable than Marvin Traub, the feted big-head who runs Bloomingdale’s, and no more pompous than almost anyone I meet at Alice Mason’s. I find myself rooting for him. Bernie is an affable man and his social climbing is only from insecurity. I was touched to recently learn from Lauder that his first language is actually German and that he fled Nazi Berlin as a child after being expelled from his Jewish boarding school on Kristallnacht and humiliated by jeering crowds. Once that fact about him is discovered, it changes one’s whole view of him and I now see his life as a story of admirable and necessary adaptation and a survivor’s social camouflage. I wish he would talk about it but he never does.
New York has so much more social mobility than London, and so many more histories like this. The Lesers are going to be in hog heaven. Exhibit A was Leonard Lauder’s sit-down dinner for twenty in their honor, which had all of the above in attendance. Si also gave a dinner for him but did the minimum, which must have disappointed Bernie. To my slight consternation, the first person I saw when I walked in was Ed Kosner. One hour previously he had just learned that I’ve not only stolen Jesse Kornbluth from New York mag but also beaten him out to hire another great writer, Ron Rosenbaum, a double whammy. When Jesse broke it to him that he was leaving, Ed apparently said, “Oh, she’s up to her old tricks again, is she?” Tee-hee.
Halfway through dinner Si asked Donald if he’d like to come into the bedroom and view his new Jasper Johns, Out the Window, for which he paid a staggering $3.63 million at Sotheby’s in November, the highest price ever paid for a living artist. The two of them trotted off and when they came back I asked Si if I could see it, too. The Johns is hanging on the wall of a functional, unloved-looking bedroom with nothing much in it except a clock radio. I muttered something about the marvel of it and the interesting influence of Rauschenberg and took pleasure in Si’s shy flush of pleasure as he gazed lovingly upon it. Seems like a ton of money to pay but maybe it will be worth more one day.
Sunday, May 3, 1987
I ran into Dick Snyder at a book launch and got an earful about the unraveling of his marriage to Joni Evans, a great modern saga of urban narcissism on steroids. It began, apparently, as the perfect two-career couple union at Simon & Schuster, romance on the job, both of them hungry killers working late together, sex on the desk, reading proofs in tandem, partners in all. She was his best editor at S & S, with a great batting average for hits. He wasn’t bothered at first that Joni is even more undomesticated than he is. But then as time went by, claims he, her lifestyle demands seemed to keep growing. “Not one driver but two drivers. Not one chef but two. Before a dinner at our place Joni would get back from the office five minutes after me. I’d be there ten of eight. She’d be showering five of. Then we’d sit down and eat whatever the chef had ordered, she couldn’t care less. She never made me so much as a tuna fish salad the whole time we were married.” (A woman after my own heart.)
For a long time, Dick didn’t miss the tuna fish salad, implication being because of other compensations (nothing makes a man miss good cooking less than good sex), but then he was promoted into the Gulf and Western stratosphere and he made Joni president of Simon and Schuster. That’s when it started to go sour. As he mellowed into Mr. Big Shot of Broad Horizons, she turned into himself ten years earlier, but even more obsessed and more driven. “One evening I was sitting looking at the sun going down at our house in Westchester and Joni was talking shop as always and I suddenly thought, I might as well be married to Marty Davis [G&W’s CEO]!” By the time the sun had disappeared Dick had asked for a divorce and Joni eagerly agreed, or so he tells me. They separated and he is now madly in love with a twenty-nine-year-old S and S book editor much lower down the totem pole who loves to travel, have sex, and, I suppose, make tuna fish sandwiches. Joni—says Dick—has become financially vengeful in retaliation and is suing him for half his Gulf and Western stock, the Bedford house, and everything else besides, claiming “she made him.” And yet they are still working together every day at S and S. The perennial irony here is that men still have all the cards. They can be driven bastards for years and ignore their kids. Then when they mellow out they can have a younger wife, a new family, and all the perks of a fresh start. The funny thing, though, was that Dick kept saying Joni had “blown it” in the marriage, but escaping from it sounds like the best thing she ever did.
Friday, May 8, 1987
I had a run-in with Al Taubman, the shopping-mall magnate and owner of Sotheby’s, at some weird dinner for Paul Laxalt, a bland Republican senator from Nevada who just announced a presidential run the day before. God knows how we got on this dinner list. Taubman is a huge, halitotic dolphin with a big, hearty laugh and beady little eyes. He was very unfriendly at first, though not to Harry, who had met him in DC and who was energetic on my behalf, trying to thaw Taubman out. Then Taubman suddenly turned to me and said, “Let me explain to you why I gave you that dirty look. In the current issue of your magazine you have horribly insulted my wife.”
What could this be? “Please explain,” I said solicitously.
“That piece on Madame Claude,” he said ominously. “The paragraph that describes Madame Claude girls who’ve gone on to marry into society, including the wife of a New York auction house chief.” Oh Jesus. James Fox’s lethal piece about the celebrated Parisian madame did indeed have that paragraph and the former Miss Israel, aka Judy Mazor Taubman, was, without doubt, the lady James had in mind. “Are you aware how few auction house chiefs there are?” says Taubman with menace. “Do you think anyone thinks it’s Mrs. Alsop of Christie’s? The halls of Sotheby’s are full of it! And my wife is being mortified by inquiries!”
Ouch. I realized we should have been a lot more careful with the disguising of identity, and now the more I learn about Judy Taubman, the daughter of a well-off jeweler who was married first to a clothing manufacturer, the more I also think James’s suppo
sition was highly unlikely. So I resorted to the old Tatler motto “there is no one I can’t apologize to” and went into a twenty-minute charm offensive of shock, consternation, and puzzled innocence, saying how preposterous it was that anyone could level such allegations blah-blah until by the end he was saying, “You’re so cute. I knew you wouldn’t be mean, but people have got the wrong end of the stick and somehow we have to figure out how to put it right.” More worryingly, he added, “My people will be calling you.” Next day the Sotheby’s PR man comes on the blower, firmly demanding reparations, and I come up with a brain wave. “What if,” I said, “I could persuade a columnist like Suzy or Liz Smith to run a piece saying it wasn’t true?” This would mean I didn’t have to disavow our story, or James Fox, a writer I adore. The PR guy loved that idea and, fortunately, Aileen Mehle (Suzy) had been at the same table last night, so I called her and she was amenable, just told me to messenger a paragraph I wanted her to publish by four p.m. Bull’s-eye. Taubman pacified, Fox protected, and no groveling required from VF.
Tuesday, May 12, 1987
The talk all week has been about Senator Gary Hart being caught with a racy blonde named Donna Rice aboard somebody’s boat, deliciously named Monkey Business, in Bimini, Florida. What makes an obviously smart guy so firmly in the public eye with a presidential run risk everything for a weekend of sex frolics? JFK, Hart’s role model, used to do this sort of thing, but Marlene Dietrich, Angie Dickinson, etc. etc. were the souls of discretion and anyhow decades ago the political press didn’t regard fucking per se as part of All the News That’s Fit to Print. I was torn whether a VF story would be too late by the time we could publish in two months, but there’s the interesting and legitimately important angle of how much press exposure is kosher for a candidate’s private life. So I asked Gail Sheehy to get on it ASAP. She’s been doing well for us. At the moment she’s on a Rudy Giuliani profile, digging to see if he’s a latter-day Eliot Ness or just a media-hungry careerist. He took Gail to tool around John Gotti’s haunts such as the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, and she says they came face-to-face with Gotti himself. Lucky Gail. Feel reporter envy.