by Tina Brown
“I didn’t know he did it twice,” said Papp mildly.
“Of course you didn’t know!” shouted Shaffer. “Because you are totally ignorant. Gielgud, my friend, did it four times. As anyone who pretends to know anything about producing Shakespeare is well aware. And nowhere, except at some ludicrous small repertory company, have I heard Shakespeare recited in the absurd way you have just performed.” It was a splendid performance that mesmerized the table. Papp was so taken aback he fell silent, and Sidney Lumet’s head went back and forth like at a Ping-Pong match. Shaffer teased him later, too. “On a film set,” he declared, “the writer is way below the makeup man in status. If I wanted to change a ridiculous line in Amadeus that traduced Mozart’s opinion of Handel, I was shooed off the set. But if the makeup man spotted a shiny nose, oh how the talcum powder flew!” I want him at every dinner party from now on.
More for the album …
Nick Coleridge is in town with his fiancé, a very beautiful young woman, Georgia Metcalfe, who looked ravishing in her long, black elbow gloves and feathery dress. His heart’s desire was to meet Tom Wolfe, so I was thrilled Tom came to the reception we gave for them. I’d forgotten I was vice chairman of the PEN dinner and therefore had to take a table, so I had the brain wave of bundling it all, arranging for a car to ferry some of our guests over to PEN to join my table with the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, whom I was so excited to meet (and try to get a piece out of). I am obsessed with his book on Haile Selassie. The good thing about being vice chair is that you get to choose your PEN writer for the table, and I chose him. It was pretty hard to talk to him, however, since Gayfryd Steinberg’s decor for the night was so over the top. There was a ton of obscuring foliage between us. It was all such a jungle of glitz you couldn’t even see the speakers—Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag—on the podium. While Brodsky intoned heartbreaking stanzas about captive dissidents, guests peered through spray-painted ferns that looked like a hooker’s idea of a harvest festival. Bob Hughes was in a lather about the foolishness of it all. We were packed in so tight we had to scream over the noise and plant life, which isn’t easy when your dinner partner is Polish. I mourned all the insights and writerly observations that were drowned out. It was pouring rain when we disgorged from the Pierre, pouf dresses for Amnesty, as Harry called it, and I had swollen glands from the acoustics. Was so wiped out I could hardly be civil to Beverly Sills, who was in the seat next to me at the opening of Chess the next night. Maybe one day I can use the headline “Down and Out with Beverly Sills.”
But guess where I am now? No, not sitting in a library reading Ryszard Kapuściński. Am on the Metroliner, speeding down to Washington to host a VF party for Gail Sheehy at the F Street Club.
Saturday, May 7, 1988
More spring fever. Classic Jerry Zipkin at a dinner after the American Ballet Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet, as Nick Dunne’s date. On the other side of Zipkin was Mrs. Asher Edelman (her husband was some Wall Street dude). Zipkin was in high-malice mode, which is always the most enjoyable. “Do you know when I last saw Makarova?” he cried. “At a dinner party twenty years ago. I was seated between her and a woman, some princess “quelque-chose” who took one look at me and vomited. I said, ‘I am Jerome Zipkin. What’s your name?’
“She said, ‘Can’t you read the place card?’
“So I said, ‘Don’t you know who you are?’ And she rose and headed straight to the bathroom, never to return. So I turned to Makarova and she said, ‘So you’re a stinking capitalist!’ And I said, ‘You bet your ass I am! Born that way and bred that way!’ And she said, ‘What do you do for sex?’ My dear, I looked at her—this was my evening all right—and I said, ‘Anything I can!’”
Monday, May 16, 1988
An interesting lunch with Si. Although one not wholly unexpected. I knew it had to be one of four things. The London company, The New Yorker, HG problems, or Alex’s job. Turned out to be the latter.
The first course was his somewhat tortured ruminations about HG’s rejection by readers, but I tried not to get too drawn into that. It took me a year to get VF right (I still shudder at our 1984 Brooke Shields Thanksgiving cover, which looked as if she had a dead chicken on her head), and he should have learned the lesson of excess prehype from Locke’s VF.
The second course arrived before we had got through the first. It sat at our elbows, cooling, as we galloped through mozzarella with tomatoes and basil.
“Well, I wondered,” said Si shyly, “if you’d ever want the … the … job.”
“Which job?” I said carefully.
“Editorial director of Condé Nast,” he said. Adding with the look of flushed hopelessness that often accompanies some outrageously golden opportunity he has just offered, “It’s not much of a job in some ways.” I realized that a lot of people would want to be in my shoes at that moment, but all I could think of was Georgie’s sweet face and my need to have more freedom and time with him, and this additional responsibility would hardly provide it.
And yet, and yet … it could be pretty great to have all the magazines to play with and would be less line responsibility than VF—and therefore be less stress. “I would work with you,” continued Si. “But the more I try to think of who to fill the role, I can’t think of anyone else that would work.” I had to play for time. “Well,” I said, “when is Alex going to retire?”
“Not now. It could be three or four years. Alex has always been good at saying no to some of my worst ideas and I need that,” he added with a grimace.
“I know that a large part of this job is to keep you in your basket,” I said dryly, and he giggled again. I told Si I would be honored to do the job if he wanted me to (who knows what I will feel three years from now?) and he said he guessed he’d stop looking for the moment.
Wednesday, May 25, 1988
I’m on a flight from London. We arrived on Saturday to find the city under the spell of early-summer magic. The luscious greenness of St. James’s Park was enchanting. We got into London on the Concorde and headed straight for the park with G, who was enthralled with the ducks and all the pigeons to chase. I taxied to Chiswick to see Mark Boxer, whom I haven’t seen since I learned of his illness. It was a melancholy scene. He was reclining on a sun bed in his beautiful garden, while his two curly-headed little girls gamboled around in their play house. His handsome face is now entirely misshapen from all the steroids, giving him the round, crooked countenance of a country squire, so odd for one of the best-looking men in London. His mind, though, is still intact and sharp and we gossiped about the New York company while his wife, Anna Ford, made tea, looking implacably cheerful. “I wish I could find a doctor who would tell me the truth,” he told me, squinting into the sun. “If one hasn’t got long, one would just like to know, that’s all.” We sat together for a while in silence.
Monday was the christening of Julie Kavanagh and Ross MacGibbon’s baby, Joseph. Julie and I are now so close, closer than in our early London days when we first bonded after being dropped in quick succession by Martin Amis. His literary superiority irritated her so much that she left her job as London editor of WWD, went to Oxford, and got a first-class degree in English lit. She still looks like an adorable Mabel Lucie Attwell children’s illustration with her round face and auburn ringlets. And Ross, a former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, is such a heartthrob. Their little Cotswold stone house at Minster Lovell is my idea of heaven. H and I are godparents to Joseph. This is when I feel a great love and longing for England. Its low-key gentleness so entirely absent in NYC, where friendships often flare and burn themselves out. The other godfathers were the actor Peter Eyre and the writer Peter Conrad. Pat Kavanagh and Julian Barnes were there, of course, and many of Julie’s rarefied literary protégés from Harpers & Queen, where she is now arts editor. Georgie babbled through the service and kept offering a stone pillar a drink. It was such a sweet day.
Afterward, we adjourned to Peter Eyre’s wedding-cake house on South
Street and had egg sandwiches served in the garden. I suppose it was the garden that made me homesick the most. I love that overwatered leafy smell of London greenness, the jungly, shabby intimacy. I love sitting in the slightly too cool early evening, with midges dancing over the fruit punch and women wandering in and out in polka-dot dresses as they descend the rusty little staircase from the sitting room down to the garden. It made me wistful for Ponsonby Terrace (which we visited to tell the tenants we are going to sell). I missed those Tatler days, when Harry was editing The Times and we used to have breakfast outside with our papers while the two fat tabbies scampered along the cat corridor.
Tuesday was the memorial service for Sir Denis Hamilton, Harry’s former chairman at Times Newspapers at St. Bride’s Church—the reason we were in London, really. Harry was one of three readers at the service. The others being some cryptic brigadier and the former editor of the Times William Rees-Mogg, who preceded Harry in the job. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Indeed, as I sat there at the end of a pew, with Rupert Murdoch at the other end, I thought it could be the perfect opening of an Anthony Powell novel. It was so rich in subtext.
There was Murdoch, who, having befriended and seduced Sir Denis Hamilton in order to secure Times Newspapers from the Thomson organization, then humiliated him by kicking him upstairs, excluding him from the running of the papers, and finally driving him out.
No one wanted Murdoch at the service, but he crassed it out and came anyway, arriving early at eleven thirty so he could get a good seat in the plum row right next to the speaker’s podium where the cameras would catch him. Sprinkled around for moral support were his flunkeys from News International. Facing the altar was the old chauffeur Harry and Hamilton shared, the garrulous Frank Bunson. He was seated beside cherubic Lord Altrincham, with his Dickensian flyaway hair. All the aging pooh-bahs of the British establishment were there, battleship-sized Lord Goodman, Lord Roll, and Lord Shawcross, a decaying eagle. Opposite were the bowed heads of the Hamilton family, the four somber mustached sons bearing up the neat, impeccably groomed widow, Olive. Such was the placement that she was diagonal to Rupert. As the thrilling strains of “I Vow to Thee My Country” soared to the rafters, her level gaze was able to meet the expressionless face of her husband’s last tormentor.
The drama was heightened by the unbearable perfection of the choir, the sudden moment of theater as the trumpets of the Durham Light Infantry played the Last Post. William Rees-Mogg read from Pilgrim’s Progress, his mellifluous whistling voice taking me back to all the dramas of the Times years. Thatcher has appointed him now to police the BBC’s taste and morality standards. A real humbug job, the apotheosis of the Gentleman Hack. The next reading was by the old brigadier Sir Nigel Poett. “Death,” he barked, “is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room.” Then Harry read Wordsworth’s “Character of the Happy Warrior,” which he’s been practicing for weeks. The church was held to attention as the words spoke to the glorious gain of the moral life. (Denis’s daughter-in-law, Sandy, said the sight of Murdoch at one end of the pew and Harry at the other was like the scales of justice.)
Although I didn’t know Hamilton except as the dry voice Harry used to speak to every Saturday night when The Sunday Times went to bed, I knew enough to be very moved by the implications of the service. The former Tory PM Edward Heath gave the address and spoke with a gravitas and solidity I admired. And he handled the Murdoch egregiousness brilliantly. He described how Denis had served first Lord Kemsley, then Lord Thomson with a tact and diplomacy that protected the editors from the caprice of their owners. Then he spoke of how Hamilton never allowed any newspaper he was associated with to let the news columns become dominated by opinion concealed as reporting. He spat out this last in Murdoch’s direction. It was a great moment of political theater. I would love to retrace the paths of so many of us in this church. Because it really is the story of England, the process by which Great Britain became Fake Britain and the values of truth and courage gave way to mediocrity and materialism. Afterward at the lunch at Reuters, Murdoch stayed out on the balcony to avoid flak. Gordon Brunton, the managing director of Times Newspapers, came barreling over with his big three-cornered head, exuding bonhomie, and said, “You must do another great newspaper, Harry.” Yeah, right. Great idea from the man who sold The Sunday Times out from under Harry to the beastly bully who fired him!
Everyone seemed much older and from a different period, with noses like white strawberries and tufts of hair in ears and nostrils.
Friday May 27, 1988
Now I am in Spain, sitting on the terrace of San Jorge, where I haven’t sat for two years. Despite the monstrous excrescences being built all over the Salto de Agua, the jasmine-scented oasis on this apron of green that darling Dad so tenderly cultivated and willed into beauty through his Panglossian energy and belief is still a paradise. But for how long? Mum confessed they are pretty much stony broke. No more movies have come in for three years and despite Dad’s Micawberism, it’s unlikely they ever will again. They can manage okay in Spain, living on the investments made after the Little Marlow sale and the odd royalty from the Miss Marple films. But it’s hard for Dad to accept that his professional life may be over. He gets bronchitis a lot, which perhaps is psychosomatic. Women are so much more flexible about the change of circumstances. They are used to improvising because they’ve always had to. Mum is thriving. Has got herself a column in the local expat mag and is getting known as the social critic of the sangria set. But she has to spend so much time shoring up Dad’s ego. She tells him he has such wonderful taste he could open an antique business, and he could, but his self-image is Movie Producer. Period. It makes me sad.
I hadn’t expected Georgie to love it here so much, but the garden is an adventure playground, and he has toddled around all day, showing his treasures to Mum and Dad with such delight. Last night he sat on Mum’s lap, enraptured by the enormous moooooon.
Saturday, June 25, 1988
Ed Victor called to tell me that while staying with him in London Dick Snyder asked Ed if he thought I would ever be interested in coming to run Simon & Schuster for him. Whoa! I remember meeting him at my first ABA just five years ago in Dallas with Ed. He seemed so unbelievably powerful then, while I was this fringe groupie hired to help Leo fix up a faltering mag. America is such an accelerator.
I thought that again at Mort Zuckerman’s brand-new Fifth Avenue apartment, high above Central Park, so high that the trees far below were like fluffy green clouds seen from an airplane window. The view must be one of the best in NYC and the space is so beautifully proportioned, even if the colors are mood-dampeningly taupe. Modern masterpieces lurk overlooked in dimly lit corners. But it clearly pleases Mort, who has adopted a new persona of sibilant low-key eminence, somewhat undercut by a Chinese takeout dinner of sweet-and-sour pork and chicken fried rice (actually served up by his Chinese manservant). This dinner was a charm offensive to get Harry back to edit US News and World Report. Therefore he danced around it for two hours, talking about how Harry belonged in DC, how he and I should do something together, etc. etc. I couldn’t resist teasing him a bit. “But it’s summer,” I said. “You usually ask Harry to edit US News in the Russian Tea Room when it’s snowing outside.” He brushed this aside, but the evening ended with the typical Mortism of “We must have more conversations about this.”
The next night we had dinner with Sally Bedell Smith and her husband, the hard-charging news-mag guy Steve Smith, at her urgent request. I have only met her briefly over the assigning of the Bill Paley piece, so it was obvious there was another agenda. Halfway through it was clear what the agenda was. “What’s your take on Mort Zuckerman?” Steve asked Harry. “I mean he seems to be seriously trying to improve US News, which will never happen under Dave Gergen [the current occupant].” I couldn’t look at Harry. It was too deliciously absurd. Mort up to his old tricks. Offering it to Steve on a Monday and Harry on a Tuesday or vice versa. We revealed nothi
ng.
STOP PRESS.
There’s a rumor going around that Anna was called upstairs and told that she is going to be editor of Vogue in September. An existing editor on the HG staff, Nancy Novogrod, is apparently being made editor of HG in her place. Makes sense because Si is clearly in a restless mood. Last week he called me up and asked me what I thought of making Nick Coleridge editorial director of London Condé. Nick could certainly do the job well but I said “interesting notion” and felt a bit of a butterfly attack. I had started to wonder if returning to the London company would not be a great move for me: slower pace and a small company to spruce up, less fraught than NYC. So I waited a week and asked him at the next opportunity. “What if I did the London job?”
He scowled. “What about VF if you left that? And Traveler, which is doing so well under Harry? That’s a lousy idea. But I have found Nick is unacceptable to the editors there so I am putting in Robert Harling for a while.” A bit of breathing time. Si is a constant instigator of staff musical chairs. I don’t know what I want really. I feel adrift. Nick would probably be better suited than me to run London. I don’t really want to go back. Would love to be pregnant again but am not. Now there’s about to be more shake, rattle, and roll with Anna going to Vogue. Competition is coming from an ex-Interview employee, Gail Love, who is launching a new mag called Fame whose dummy is an outrageous knock-off of VF. Feeling the constant nag of New York ambition, mine and others. The churn.
Tuesday, July 5, 1988
An extraordinary week of turbulence in the CNP building. The Anna story broke on the evening news, throwing all the management announcement plans into rout. True to form, Condé hadn’t bothered to tell Grace Mirabella that she was out. So she learned of her dismissal from a TV report. As it happens, I was giving a birthday party for Harry that night—Robert Hughes, Dick Holbrooke, Melvyn Bragg, Robert Caro, Peter Jennings, and many others. Si and Victoria were an hour late, no doubt because of red-hot phones. Si was very excitable, asked me what I thought of “the changes,” and I said, diplomatically, that I thought Anna would do much better with Vogue than with HG, which I do. Whereupon he shook his head and said he’d always rather liked the new HG, but no one else does, and it just goes to show you can’t tamper too fast with a loyal readership. But the Condé building is all fired up about why the HG misfire now merits Anna’s promotion to the company flagship and the Grace camp trying to put it out that Si has the hots for her. It’s probably a smart move ultimately on Si’s part. He moved too quickly to put her into HG but there is no one better than Anna for Vogue. If he lets her get too tarnished by the flak at HG, it could make it difficult to keep her mystique to advertisers at Vogue. Tough on Grace, though, to become the roadkill. Ironically, we ran into Lou Gropp, the ex–House & Garden ed, walking on the beach in Quogue yesterday. He said this was a Bernie maneuver to threaten Alex with someone stronger than Grace at Vogue, but that seems unlikely.