by Tina Brown
The Reagans arrived promptly, as before, without any fanfare, impeccably groomed and holding hands. Nancy was in a floor-length red cashmere dress that clung to her youthful, pert body. The president seemed, as before, totally out of it, except on some level he must be present because as he sat and walked through the shoot, he kept quipping away with private jokes that caused her to laugh with such hilarity, it was as if she’d just heard them for the first time. (Mum used to say the secret of any successful marriage is continuing to laugh at your husband’s jokes. When wives stop laughing, husbands get new wives, not new jokes.)
“Wave,” Annie said.
“Who are we waving to?” Nancy asked.
“Congress, Nancy,” the president replied.
Then they withdrew for a costume change and came back wearing matching red sweaters (who thought of that?) and sat down on a bench in the garden. I was struck again at how much of a unit they are, how they adore each other. In a deep sense, politics seems to utterly pass them by.
A few days later I dispatched Sarah Giles with the pictures for Nancy to look at, in case there was again any pushback. She loved them and asked for copies. Sarah said that as they stood in the map room where Churchill had met with Roosevelt, Mrs. Reagan was seeking approval for a pair of earrings she had bought for Betsy Bloomingdale for Christmas. Apparently, Barbara Bush is fit to be tied that Nancy has been zero help on the Bush campaign, but to me it seems entirely appropriate that Nancy, having no convictions nor commitments to anything except her husband, should, as his term in office ends, withdraw once again to the world of shopping for earrings.
Saturday, October 22, 1988
Life is extremely complicated. G’s nanny, Janet, left last Friday, which is traumatic for G. Fortunately, Harry’s daughter, Kate, has been staying and has agreed to hang out while I find a new nanny, which makes the loss less great for G as he adores her. She’s wonderful to have around and I love having her here. So fun and relaxed and practical, unlike his harried mother. I love sitting and catching up with her in the kitchen over tea. G hasn’t mentioned Janet much but perhaps will when he knows she’s not coming back. I also imported Mum and Dad for two weeks to distract him, about which he’s ecstatic. It’s so comforting the way family dynamics change with the arrival of children. When we first got together Kate was so resentful of Harry leaving her mother for me. That’s all changed now. She is so over London and loves being with us in New York. Now I understand why in South Asia families live together in an interconnected commune. We are suddenly a real extended family. It’s making Harry so happy to have her here.
Si called and asked me out to lunch next Thursday with Alex. It could just be a brain pick about who could edit Glamour or Mademoiselle, but the two of them have never asked me to lunch together since the day I was hired. As before, it has to be one of two things. The New Yorker, or Alex’s job … last week the writer David Halberstam told me that all the New Yorker journalists are up in arms because they feel that no one cares about the nonfiction side of the magazine.
Sunday, October 30, 1988
Quogue
The lunch with Si and Alex was distinctly strange … It began with Si furtively brandishing a trashy-looking woman’s mag called Women that he wants to buy. My heart sank. I don’t particularly want to be consulted about that, though I s’pose I should be flattered by the consigliere role. “It sells five hundred thousand copies,” says Si. “I think it would be for us like New Woman has been for Rupert.” Obviously competition with Rupert is never far from Si’s mind. At nearby tables at the Four Seasons, Clay Felker was lunching with Bernie Leser, and Ed Kosner was lunching with Geraldine Stutz. They both kept looking over, curious about what’s going on in the musical chairs of CNP.
The day after the print order meeting, Si had said to me, “Lunch tomorrow … it’s just a general conversation … on the other thing … The New Yorker … I’m still unsure. I don’t know.” I have now swung the other way and am eager to dispel the idea I want it. G needs me to be calmer, not busier.
But after we had got past the ruminations of the Woman magazine idea, Alex suddenly exclaimed, “But Si, I believe your real project now must be The New Yorker. It must change or it will die! I would love to see you make the Brave Move.” I see now that Alex fancies redoing TNY with me and thereby extending his own empire. And having fun. And he’s egging Si on to do this. Si’s brow furrowed. “To put Tina into The New Yorker would be a coup de théâtre … but I haven’t solved the problem of the readership.” He feels burned, I think by the HG reader insurrection. “My problem,” he continued, “is I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
To Alex’s surprise, I think, I said I thought he should respect that instinct and wait for further developments. I hope he didn’t feel I’d broken ranks with him. I haven’t shared with him the ambivalence that sends me back and forth about The New Yorker’s attractions. Aside from my own private life issues with G, my objective assessment is Si should do nothing with The New Yorker at the moment. Right now, his problem is that he’s five hundred ad pages down, but he has six hundred thousand subscribers, which is still a lot.
The quality of the ads is dismal—a few quarter pages of lugubrious crushable safari hats and dubious sterling silver jewelry. Clearly what has to happen is that New Yorker subscribers are turned back into active readers, as well as adding younger ones. (“Easier to praise than to read,” as Tom Wolfe brilliantly put it.) Advertisers are bailing because of the rising age of readers and the lack of reader response they get. (The defection is not helped by the fact that Steve Florio clumsily fired all the top ad staff who had relationships, I am told, giving clients no reason to stick around for loyalty.)
What Florio hankers for is the quality of readership that VF has, the opinion formers and the conspicuous spenders who read us from cover to cover. I believe I could do it editorially, but the great insoluble problem right now is the PR. The perception of me is flashy, fast, and scandalous. The New Yorker staff and the media critics won’t believe that high literary quality can coexist with visual excitement or be rendered more enticing by headlines and blurbs (and—heaven forfend!—cover lines), which make people want to start the safari into impenetrable type.
Given the caliber of writers I have attracted to VF, if I was some besuited beard in a red tie I would be hailed for my literary choices. But even in a report on this week’s Editor of the Year citation in Ad Age, the writer calls my pointing up the magazine’s journalistic chops as “a starlet wanting to play Juliet.” Which, when I think of the great work by Shoumatoff, T. D. Allman, Joyce Johnson, John Richardson, Marie Brenner, Barbara Goldsmith, and so many more, is fucking sexist crap. Women get stuck with being trivialized and just have to smile. If Si gives me The New Yorker now, the howls of “philistine!” would be very tough to overcome and might scare off more advertisers. Maybe in a year or more, the advertisers’ perception will be more universally shared by the readership, and make it easier to update the magazine in the way it needs. At the moment, any dinner party is split fifty-fifty. The more intellectually confident people all agree that TNY is on a passport to doom. But the other 50 percent who actually don’t really read it will always come to its defense and speak of a recent, definitive fifty-thousand-word piece on the Great Barrier Reef. Until this 50 percent also perceive The New Yorker is in decline, it would be very unwise to move Gottlieb.
I said all this, but did not agree with Alex that good quality writing is hard to find in a weekly. I cited The New Republic and The New York Review of Books and Bob Hughes’s fantastic art criticism in Time, published weekly, and I did say that The New Yorker doesn’t actually use its glittering writers—people such as John Updike and the baseball writer Roger Angell—in the way that it could and should. I guess the fact that we were discussing it means I am still the top candidate in his mind. Afterward, Alex got into a different limo and sped off to Connecticut. Si and I went back to the office together. “Alex is all for change,”
he said ruefully, as we purred along. “He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” He said it with the proud, adoring way of someone who knows he can share something with a fellow believer. I’ve always made my delight in Alex apparent to Si, whereas some Condé eds, like Art Cooper at GQ, just wish he was off their back (as they would me if I was editorial director). I think Si is grateful for that. “You should hang on to him as long as you possibly can,” I said.
Over dinner at the Buckleys’, Pat was very funny about the horror of a weekend at Mar-a-Lago as a guest of Ivana Trump for a “spa” weekend. Apparently they put her in the “conquistador suite” and she never found her way back for dinner. When she eventually relocated the party, she found Ivana and co dressed, not as Pat was, in a linen dress and bandanna but in full Carolyne Roehm black-tie regalia with commensurate diamonds. Pat is an amazing hostess. Presides over all the cooking herself, which is a rarity at the dinners I go to. “Did I put too much stock in the soup?” she asks. Or to Bill Blass, “I am trying out this new Sauternes but it’s not nearly as nice as the one you serve.”
“I’ll send you over a case,” said Blass, and to me: “One of the nicest things about being as rich as I am is the ability to make these kinds of grand gestures.”
Laugh-out-loud note. Park Avenue hostess Nan Kempner at a lunch last week discussing her estranged husband, Tommy. “I am feeling so good now that Tommy is back,” she said. “Kicking him out after taking shit for thirty-seven years was the best thing I ever did.”
“Where did he go when you kicked him out?” I asked.
“Downstairs to the guest room,” Nan said. “It was time for him to know what it was like in the cold outside world. He had to give his own orders to the cook, make his own plans for dinner, give his own laundry to the maid. When I had a dinner party I left a note for him saying, ‘Stay out tonight. I am having a dinner party for friends,’ and he had to take himself on his own to a movie. Tina, it was the most salutary thing I ever did.”
Monday, November 14, 1988
I am on my way to LA for a very quick trip. We’re doing a promotion event for Sarah Giles’s Fred Astaire oral history and afterward Wendy Stark, undeterred by her father’s wrath, is giving a dinner for me. I decided to have Wendy do the dinner as a peacekeeping move. Why? Because my two contributing LA editors, Caroline Graham and Wendy, are locked in a bitter rivalry. The girls each want what the other has. Wendy has boyfriend famine but her daddy Ray Stark’s power and millions behind her. Caroline is willowy and gorgeous and can’t keep men away but is economically challenged. Hence a duel to the death.
On election night after a dinner with Bernie Leser, we went over to Diane von Furstenberg’s suite at the Carlyle to watch the election returns with Susan Sontag and David Rieff, Carl Bernstein, Bianca Jagger, Harry Fane, and various other social types who sat shouting abuse at the TV in the bedroom. We all watched glumly as Dukakis said, “From this experience we have a lesson to learn.” “You learn it, asshole,” said Rieff. Joan Buck, always incorrigibly dramatic, came wearing a black mourning veil in anticipation of the foregone conclusion.
So it’s to be President George Herbert Walker Bush and Vice President J. Danforth Quayle aka Dan. Like Batman and Robin except Bush as Bruce Wayne’s goofy great-uncle and Quayle as a boy but not a wonder. Still, it’s hard to mourn the rout of the Democrats yet again. Dukakis looked a shoo-in in July when he accepted the nomination to the strains of Neil Diamond singing “Coming to America.” He was riding high in the polls. He was the duke, proud son of Greek immigrants, successful governor, pragmatic policy guy who was all about getting things done. Then he took the rest of the summer off while Lee Atwater and co turned him into a flag-burning, pledge of allegiance–hating, murderer-coddling, elitist Harvard wimp. The debacle of the Snoopy impression on the tank in the ridiculous ill-fitting helmet. Why do the Democrats keep nominating stiffs? We went through this with Walter Mondale. But at least he had the excuse that he was running against a popular incumbent.
When I went to the White House to lunch with Barbara Bush and other lady editors a while back, she already seemed a doughty first lady with her Mount Rushmore head and imposing chest. A true Daughter of the American Revolution, a reassuring aunt who could outclass poor Kitty Dukakis with her neurotic drive and slimming pills. Oh dear.
American success. The rise and fall. There is nothing sweeter when you’re up. Nothing glummer when you’re down. I have a lot to thank God for this Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 15, 1988
I always feel serene and happy in LA, although for the first time I had doubts about living there. Perhaps it was just a little too much time discussing Oprah Winfrey’s weight loss, a few too many programs on TV about working out and looking good.
I sat between Barry Diller and Jeff Berg at Wendy’s dinner. Diller was an insistent presence, hogging all the conversation from the ICM agent Jeff Berg, who is such a clever mind. Diller kept singing Rupert’s praises; in Diller’s universe having a billion dollars makes everything you do ultimately smart.
Wendy is so bright and funny she ought to be married to some big powerhouse who could take on her father instead of attracting one fortune hunter after another. She is still trying to lose weight, this time going to Oprah’s diet doctor for special herbal vitamin pills. They cost her five hundred dollars and she dropped them all over the floor just before the party and the dog gobbled them up. “Oh my God,” she screamed. “Should I take her to the ER? Should she have liposuction?” (A strange idea for a remedy.) It’s amazing how Bel Air people do conform to their stereotypes.
Back at the hotel I spent an hour approving the last changes in T. D. Allman’s remarkable Haiti piece in the next issue. The principal product of Haiti’s government, he says, is kleptocracy. Tim has become a classic foreign correspondent in our pages, and this report captures the power of Haiti’s magic and the nature of its pain. Like Nick Dunne, he always manages to collide with characters who define the strangeness of the atmosphere. In his piece the latest oppressor, General Prosper Avril, suddenly appears at a beach party with mistress and retinue in tow. A strongman pays a courtesy call, in evening dress, to ensure his standing with the men who matter. The Haiti piece may be even better than the one he did for us on Panama’s Iago, General “Tony” Noriega. So glad we have him.
Friday, November 25, 1988
Elkhorn Ranch, Arizona
I am a long, long way from all of the above. Last weekend we flew here to spend Thanksgiving on the ranch with G, back in the little stone-floored adobe cabin with the fireplace and the oil paintings of lone cowboys riding through snow and elks cantering around.
There’s something enormously appealing about the people here. Not just the sure, sturdy wranglers and the Miller family who own it, but the guests young and old. They seem so sunny and uncomplicated compared to the tortured souls we all know “back East” as they say. G is alarmed by windmills, so Harry is teaching him how they work and he likes to act it out after dinner in the dining room, when we sit beside the fire having our coffee. Yesterday as a storm gathered he kept talking about the storm “biting the mountains,” which was so poetic.
After Thanksgiving lunch on the terrace we climbed into the ranch van and drove the two hours to a Tucson medical center to have G’s earache looked at before we fly. We have conquered G’s fear of doctors from his preemie days by asking this one to examine each of our ears first. A nurse helped matters by giving him a green donkey. “A nice green donkey!” he kept saying with his best grin. Then we went to find a place for tea and the only thing open was some overluxe hotel and in the meantime G had soiled his diaper and Harry burst into the posh dining room, waving a smelly diaper, followed by G waving his green donkey and shouting for some reason, “I don’t want my dinosaur boots!”
After the beauty of the ranch the Tucson mall was disorienting and depressing, a sprawling, characterless mess of Kmarts and gas stations and drugstores. As we drove around in the blinding rain, or cruised
down the fluorescent-lit aisles of throbbing products in the gigantic pharmacy where we went to collect G’s prescriptions, I thought how this is an America I will never warm to, America as a huge, vacant, product-filled, centerless, culturally sterile parking lot. It’s fiercely alien to me and in a way I’m glad that it is. If it weren’t, I’m not sure I’d be able to successfully edit Vanity Fair. I might not have the confidence to choose with uninhibited focus what interests me to read about.
The soulless, anonymous America of shopping malls and strip malls, of chain stores, Dunkin’ Donuts, Walmarts, Drug Fairs … whenever I roam those aisles I feel dispossessed yet enclosed by them. I wonder if my tight little European soul will ever expand enough to fit. I fear it won’t but that it will never shrink back down enough to fit England again. My home is now Transatlantica. That place between England and America is the only world where I can be happy now.
PS, on the way back to NYC, a humorous (to me) press release came out, announcing that Grace Mirabella has been hired by Rupert to launch Mirabella, a new fashion mag for the over-fifties. What a swivet that must be sending Si into, his archrival scooping up Grace. She is sure to steal some staff and has so much support on Seventh Avenue. Also every talk show Grace goes on will start with the manner of her firing. Nothing can touch Vogue and Anna will win. But it’s still good for Si to understand that firing people boorishly does have business as well as social implications. The launch of Mirabella is a delicious Judith Krantz touch in the media soap opera.
Saturday, December 3, 1988
Coming back from DC after a Man Ray exhibit at the National Museum of Art in Washington. Sitting between Ben Bradlee and Ambassador Gottlieb of Canada last night, I felt relaxed and jolly as I do in London. It was civilized and warm. Not the high-key hysteria that the new-money barons inject into NYC with the crazy upping of the ante that makes social life so tense.