by Tina Brown
At the end of the party, the art department all struck rowdy poses and we took pictures. Lloyd Ziff seized two assistants from VF, shouting, “This one’s for French Vogue.”
“You can’t take this magazine anywhere,” said Stephen Schiff as they all tramped out. Dear colleagues. Dear friends.
Friday, June 26, 1987
After my buzzing dining room all week I was happy to loll in bed tonight and watch TV. As I zapped between channels I landed on a new documentary about the 1979 murder of San Francisco’s mayor Moscone and the gay rights activist Harvey Milk, narrated by Harvey Fierstein. I found it utterly gripping and important. The footage showed the excitable, exhibitionistic Harvey Milk ranting his freedom cry to “come out of the closet!,” the pale, repressed face of the “family man” who slew him, and the streets full of candles as thousands tramped in a night vigil after the murder. All the passion of those days less than a decade ago! So much feeling, now cooled. All those messages of hope that now have been blighted by the advent of AIDS.
Tuesday, June 30, 1987
I’m on the Washington shuttle on the way to Kay Graham’s seventieth birthday party. A more than six-hundred-strong black-tie thrash for the A list, or should I say, the Kaylist. I am sitting across from the Wall Street investor and CEO of CBS, Larry Tisch. He is somewhat more charming than the fleshy gargoyle face would suggest. And he was, I must say, very good humored when he asked me to reach up to the overhead compartment to get down his jacket and I tipped it upside down so all his money and pens and credit cards rained down on his bald head, and he had to grovel around under the seat and retrieve them. I was tempted to hang on to his Amex.
I walked out early from an office seething with problems, another high-horse outburst from André over a picture choice, Reinaldo Herrera protesting a Farrah Fawcett photo shoot for being “dreadfully common,” and Gail Sheehy suddenly wanting to be legally indemnified for her (explosive) Gary Hart story. The piece is Gail at her best. She’s again proving the editorial point that just when the media pack has exhaustively trampled all over it, it’s the very time to rereport it. She’s gone deep into Hart’s early life, talking to his sister, schoolmates, campaign aides, re-creating his repressed childhood in a fundamentalist family that then gave way to a rebellion that pushed him to its farthest extremes. We’ve called it “The Road to Bimini” and it’s shit hot.
Georgie is missing me a lot. “Quality time” is a myth. Babies want slow, wasted time together, not intense nose-to-nose “involvement.” There is no comparison; G is much happier with me after a weekend of looking after him than during the wound-up hours we have when I return home after work for guilty play sessions on the floor. By the end of the week when I have been working, he’s saved his best smiles and cuddles for the new nanny, Janet, a high-spirited, down-to-earth girl from Minnesota, which breaks my heart.
Wednesday, July 1, 1987
The Kay Graham birthday party was tremendous fun and groaning with clout … H and I rendezvoused at the Hay-Adams hotel—so great to have some couple time. I am very much in love with my husband at the moment. Then on to the cavernous Departmental Hall Auditorium that the Graham kids, Lally, Bill, Steve, and Don Graham, had rented to toast their mother for the evening.
It was a massive assembly of big shots, including President Reagan and Nancy, all guests rejoicing at being handpicked to be there. There is nothing like the presence of the president to make everyone feel the Chosen Ones. I saw Nora Ephron give an extremely wide berth to Margaret Jay and vice versa, which is not surprising after Heartburn satirized Margaret’s affair with Carl Bernstein so hilariously.
Harry had taken the wise precaution of going to the Post earlier and having tea with Ben Bradlee, to bury the hatchet over the “cliterature” debacle. Ben said he was sick of that fucking feud anyway, so when I saw Barbara Walters talking to Sally Quinn, I went over to Sally and said hi and gave her a hug and she responded with an acceptable amount of warmth, which felt a relief. Murdoch’s face has degenerated to the melting rubber mask of a cartoon character, like Nixon’s. He danced with Brooke Astor with his glasses dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Anna Murdoch seemed serene on whatever plane she lives on. Kay was wearing an oddly girlish white Oscar de la Renta polka-dot summer dress, nipped at the waist, which probably made her feel young but seemed a bit eccentric next to all the diamonds and pearls. You sense she is very self-conscious, and always hoping to get this clothes thing right. George Schultz looked like a twinkle-free Rex Harrison in a white moiré dinner jacket. His toast was bland but also quintessentially Washington in that it displayed the purely networking motivation of his friendship with Kay. “When I first came to Washington I was warned never to cross swords with Kay Graham, so I made a point of getting to know her under relaxed circumstances and now we cross tennis rackets instead.” Ho. Ho.
Reagan looked much younger and fitter than on TV or in his current news pictures. Maybe he was just in a good mood. He described how he had been addressing a stag dinner out of town and Nancy got a call from Kay, asking if she was alone for dinner. “So my wife didn’t spend a lonely evening because when she got to Kay’s she found she was a guest of honor at a very lovely dinner party.” Which to me said that Kay had read a news account of Ronnie being out of town and swiftly bagged Nancy to hot up her dinner. But perhaps I am a cynic. Or just am unfamiliar with Beltway etiquette. Art Buchwald at least was honest (and funny, which he has to be as a humor columnist). He had flown in for the dinner from Martha’s Vineyard with William and Rose Styron. “The fantastic turnout tonight can only be attributed to one thing,” he said in his remarks. “Fear.” And then in a sly reference to the Post’s Watergate coverage: “Kay doesn’t know how old she is because last month someone shredded her birth certificate.”
I was thrilled to be seated next to Michael Kinsley, who now has the Steichen-era haircut, and transparent glasses. He’s such a wit I can’t get enough of him. “Does Leon Wieseltier still work for you at The New Republic?” I asked as we started our first course.
“Just because you fired him doesn’t mean I have to,” he shot back. (Leon’s Vox column was a problem. His rant about Nora Ephron, calling Heartburn child abuse because of how it would one day be read by her son, Jacob, was too savage and I shouldn’t have let it through. More important, if you’re going to be rude about people, it has to be in your own name.)
Kinsley dragged me off to the dance floor for an overenthusiastic fox-trot, which allowed me to ogle Kay in the uneasy embrace of the president and get Kinsley’s running commentary. Kay’s expression was tentative as Reagan whirled her jauntily around the floor, and she kept glancing to the left and right as if to verify this crowd was really there for her. It was all a bit like the dancing version of a state funeral. There were so many fired Newsweek editors on parade, Harry said the party was full of people rising above their own sense of dignity. Still, it was a glorious night of grande dame splendor that made everyone there feel in the biggest of big time.
Monday, July 20, 1987
Why are the mothers in the little park near our apartment so damn stuck up? There’s a clique of them, very spoiled looking, with WASPy little purses and a lot of time on their hands, it seems. They never invite me and G to join them when we are down there in the evening, no doubt because I am from the enemy tribe of Working Moms. When I walk down the ramp into the park with G, another world takes over. The iron benches along the park’s railings always feature at least one hollow-eyed wino. They form a sort of reproachful magic circle in the middle of which the offspring of Sutton Place’s wealth, luck, and good health act out their charmed childhoods.
* * *
We bowled through problems at the office, except for one. Doug has demanded we eat into the usually unbroken run of feature pages with eight new ads that have to be adjacent to editorial. It ruins the layouts. So I marched up to Si to see if he would approve the extra cost of adding more pages. He was, as always lately, in a buoyant mood. He
has framed the original artwork of the Krazy Kat comic strips to hang behind his desk and he was brandishing a yellow, lined pad featuring ominous breakdowns of the ad-page count in New York magazine, Connoisseur, and other competitors. All of which I knew meant that cost is on his mind, and he would turn me down, which he did.
“But you shouldn’t eat into the feature run with ads,” he said.
“We have to,” I said, “or Doug will need to turn away the advertisers who are insisting on editorial adjacencies.”
“That’s his problem,” said Si, amiably. “He should think of another way to sell ads.”
“You know we can’t bank up the ads together,” I said. “Or we lose them.”
“Then he better find a better way to bank ads,” said Si, looking positively festive at this impasse. “They have to understand the rules of the game, otherwise it’s economic chaos.”
I saw the force of the argument but also knew that in the real world, which Si doesn’t live in, there was no way Doug could go back to all the clients and swagger around and tell them to eat their adjacencies. So I returned to the art department and committed acts of violence on my own page count. Painful, and I had to do an apology tour to the ejected writers—but the honest truth was, it didn’t hurt the overall issue.
Saturday, August 15, 1987
A day of Quogue heaven! We sped off to Shelter Island to have lunch with Bob and Victoria Hughes, packing up an enormous beach bag for G including his box of Band-Aids to fiddle with, his barrel of monkeys, and his beach ball. By the time we arrived at Bob’s modest shingled house it was raining. We sat out on the porch, talking about this week’s issue of The New Republic with Leon (who seems to bear no ill will about Vox biting the dust) and Mahnaz Wieseltier, and the rain made everything smell heavenly. Bob was at his most pugnacious, strutting around in his baggy shorts and T-shirt, inveighing improbably against “pooftahs” like Charles Moore, who runs The Spectator in England, and the “Witches of Eastwick” as he calls Nora Ephron, Lally Weymouth, and the “other Southampton frightfuls” he dreads seeing if he ever goes out.
Leon and Mahnaz left, the sun came out, and Bob offered us a ride around the bay on his boat to show us the new house he’s bought with his book advance (“Casa Fatal Shore,” as he calls the house). We feared G would be scared of the boat, but he adored it, as Bob put it “prancing around like a dervish on the poop,” jumping up and down in Harry’s arms, eyes glowing, arms waving. On the way home we stopped for tea at a café that had a rocking horse; for twenty-five cents G had a wild ride.
Thursday, August 27, 1987
September VF is smoking-hot and the feedback is thrilling. It’s juicy, it’s meaty, and full of our best stuff in every category—Gail Sheehy’s Gary Hart piece is making much news, the revamped Diane Sawyer cover story is glorious and gorgeous, and also making noise (Annie shot her languorously lolling back on the couch with her legs up, which has sparked a furor of is-this-appropriate-for-a-news-anchor?) the fascinating, sexy extract from Kathleen Tynan’s memoir of her life with Ken, whose thrilling theater criticism is still unmatched anywhere. We’ve been able to use my favorite debonair David Bailey picture of Ken in a white suit, mid-drag on a deadly cigarette (smoking killed him in the end). It’s such a great issue. I just hope we can keep it up.
The Four Seasons at lunch was full of media nabobs eating the grilled swordfish in their regular booths and plotting one another’s downfall. John Fairchild of W was masticating on Anna Wintour news. She’s coming back to New York to edit House & Garden! After twenty months of kicking up the adrenaline of British Vogue, she has now had a second child and wants to get back here with David. Apparently he hates the commute as much as Harry did. She did a crackling job with Vogue but the British hacks were always on her case calling her “nuclear Wintour” and Gabé said she found it lonely with the two young babies. Plus London is definitely less good for ascendant women. She told me when we lunched on her last trip here that at her first Vogue features meeting she suggested a piece about all the women judges in England and was told there aren’t any! Knowing Si’s fierce competitiveness, she probably did what any intelligent person would do: deftly put out rumors that she was considering a move to Hearst.
Trouble is, Alex seems unwilling to fire Grace Mirabella and give Anna American Vogue, so to keep her at Condé Si has airlifted her into House & Garden, ejecting the luckless Lou Gropp, who knew none of this until his staff read the leak in W. When all hell broke loose, Si panicked his way downstairs to belatedly fire Lou in person, only to find he’d gone on vacation! So when Lou called in from a phone booth in LA Si gave him the news on the phone. What unholy frightfulness! Lou has been there forever. He probably needed to go but surely not in this manner. Reminds me yet again that with Si you never show vulnerability and always play tough. More chaos was caused because Marie-Paule Pellé, the stylish French editor of Vogue Decoration, has recently arrived to be Lou’s creative director with the implicit understanding she would succeed him soon. There is no way that a fiercely independent taste baron like Marie-Paule would like being subservient to Anna, who would view her as foisted on her by Alex. So today, apparently, there was a big face-off with Alex, Si, Anna, and Marie-Paule to try to calm Marie-Paule down. I sent a message to her to come see me afterward since I could badly use her aesthetic for visual features on VF. Harry needs such a person, too, so I told her that if things didn’t work at H & G she could get a joint deal with Traveler and VF. “I do not need thees drama! Eet is not what I was promised!” she said haughtily about her new situation. She was in too much of a huff to focus on my suggestion but the idea was planted and I will keep watering it. Condé Nast corporate politics are more intense than ever.
Tuesday, September 1, 1987
Condé drama continues. In one of her more brisk incursions, Anna offered André Leon Talley a job at H & G and he’s taking it. She called me up and said, “Hi, how’s Harry? How’s the baby? Just one thing, I’m taking André.” There’s supposed to be a taboo at Condé about internal poaching. It happens, of course, but usually with Alex as umpire. On the other hand, it’s not really a surprise, especially after the run-ins with André lately. And he’s so operatic, oh well. I am already eyeballing his replacement in the fashionista Marina Schiano, an Italian Morticia in cat’s-eye sunglasses who I always see sitting in the front rows at the collections. She’s a former model and muse of Yves Saint Laurent, famous for a ravishing black-lace back shot by Jeanloup Sieff. Warhol loved her, too, and put her on the cover of Interview. (It’s an incestuous world. She briefly married Fred Hughes, apparently to get a green card.) She’d be a catch for VF and would likely bring fashion advertising with her. Change is often good. I am feeling pretty cocky at the moment because the July VF numbers just came in at 191,000 on the newsstand, an increase of over 38 percent compared to June.
One thing I have learned is that when one person leaves an organization, it destabilizes things and inevitably you lose someone else shortly after. It becomes a domino chain.
In more media fun and games, Fred Hughes fired Gail Love as editor of Interview and is making overtures to Sarah Giles. This is more rattling than André. Who could replace Sarah as a Rolodex jockey if she’s stolen too, which I strongly hope she won’t be? Outside the tent she would be a crazed competitor.
Clay Felker wrote a brilliant editor’s letter in his first issue of Manhattan,inc. He spoke of the “churning” of Manhattan power, the inevitable process of “irreplaceable people replacing each other all the time.” Perhaps it was always thus in capitals of power, except in earlier times when status was predetermined by birth and station. New York is the essence of ego on the rise. In a way, I am enjoying the churn. Competition will keep us hot. And speaking of churn, Joni Evans has finally left S and S for her own imprint at Random House, a break made on the wings of her divorce from Dick Snyder. His quote in The New York Times was a chilling echo of the churn. “Joni Evans leaves with our respect, admiration and affection
. S and S is a very strong company with considerable depth and resources and will remain so.” And off the record, a person who was clearly Dick: “We’re talking about one person. Joni contributed significantly to the trade division. We will replace her.” Hard to believe, really, that he was talking about his recent wife.
Saturday, September 5, 1987
All the press on Anna’s arrival is positioning her as a future ed of Vogue, which must make Grace Mirabella shake in her shoes. The press is already hoping for rivalry between us. Anna is too frontal for feuds and Vogue has never interested me. I suppose catfights are the cliché that always dog (as it were) powerful women working in the same business. Actually her presence upstairs is a bit like suddenly having a sleek-haired race-horse pawing the other side of the fence.
Determined not to be distracted, I headed out to Quogue, emptied two boxes of manuscripts and read and extracted Donald Trump’s autobiography, The Art of the Deal, which has a crassness I like. In the end, the only thing about self-serving books like this is, do they capture the true voice? Like Julian Schnabel’s loudmouthed soliloquy I bought for the August issue, there is something authentic about Trump’s bullshit. Anyway, it feels, when you have finished it, as if you’ve been nose to nose for four hours with an entertaining con man and I suspect the American public will like nothing better. Very glad I got it for the mag. Also read Marie Brenner’s book on the Bingham newspaper dynasty and am very, very impressed. It’s a fantastic family saga that will greatly lift an issue.
Sunday, September 13, 1987
Feeling cranky. Anna’s André swipe is proving aggravating and it’s difficult to find his combination of fashion know-how and celebrity people skills. I am still circling Marina, trying to decide if she’s right, and interviewed Marian McEvoy, but she doesn’t have the André flair. Anna has already launched into a full-throttle make-over at House & Garden. John Richardson, who is still on their payroll, came down after Anna’s first staff meeting and gave a bitchy rendition of her new brief. “I need a Louise Brooks wig to do this properly,” he warbled. Then he launched into “‘Biedermeier is out! Nothing old-fashioned! It’s got to be fashion, fashion, fashion!’ Apparently I am now working for House & Closet!” One good thing. Gabé is quitting British Vogue and moving to New York to join Anna at HG. I knew they’d hit it off.