The Vanity Fair Diaries

by Tina Brown

  “Yes,” he croaked, jovial and ashen at the same time.

  “And I feel,” I went on merrily, “that in eighteen months I could take Bazaar from number four to number one, and that would give me the satisfaction that would compensate for the loss of the narrative journalism I love at Vanity Fair.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said hoarsely.

  “But I’ll think about what you suggest,” I said. And left his office, knowing he was catching the Concorde to London at lunchtime to cement the purchase of Century Hutchinson Publishers.

  Within thirty minutes Alex was in my office.

  “May I close the door?” he said conspiratorially. “My dear, I’m distraught. Si has just told me. I’m appalled by this. Appalled. You don’t know how much you’d give up by going to a fashion magazine. It would trivialize you permanently. I have even suffered from it myself in my career. You can’t leave the intelligence of this journalistic endeavor for the gross obsession of commerce.” There was an edge of suspicion to Alex’s look that made me sense his deepest fear beneath all this apparent concern. “I have been to Si and offered to step aside,” he said. “My job is yours if you want it.”

  “Alex!” I said. “Please don’t ever say that. This is not a power play. There is no such thing as ‘your job.’ There is you and when you choose to leave it, it will melt away. Si will just have strong editors and grow into running the show himself. But Alex, I have to think of me now. No one else is going to. I look around and see how editors end up at Condé Nast and it’s not pretty.” He winced.

  “I have a great many family responsibilities. My father is not able to provide for their last years.” I got emotional at this point, mentioning Mum and Dad. Doctors are such a disaster in Malaga. When their health fails they won’t be able to stay for much longer. Their house in Salto de Agua will never sell for the kind of money they would need to buy a place in London. I’d love to be able to solve that problem.

  “My dear!” he said, embracing me. “This is terrible. I had no idea you had such worries. Let me talk to Si and intervene!” (I didn’t mention Si’s proposed deal. Who knows what Alex himself is paid? And he’s not called the Silver Fox for nothing. This could all have been about sussing out what I had been offered by Si to stay.) He left and I headed out to the Four Seasons to have lunch with Shirley Clurman. When I got there, Julian, the maître d’, said, “Mr. Newhouse is trying to reach you. I’ll bring a phone to the table. I gather he’s at the airport.”

  “Let me take this at the desk,” I said, as the other lunchers were casting me curious looks.

  “Tina!” Si said as I huddled over the maître d’s desk. “Alex told me all about your family problems. Let me assume those responsibilities. Let me take on the burden of helping with your parents’ apartment and any medical expenses in the future.” This was beyond belief. It was so personal, so kind, that it swept away all my efforts to keep seeing this move as a business opportunity. I thought of the joy and relief it would offer to Mum and Dad to be able not to worry anymore about money or medical crises, so they aren’t just dependent on the NHS when they go back to live in England, as they eventually must.

  I had never expected this and I doubt very much that Hearst, which is a trust, could ever do something this unusual for a person they care about, or rather I couldn’t possibly ask it. Of course, with the way the magazine is growing, a piece of Vanity Fair would mean I could well afford to help my parents very handsomely without Si’s moving gesture. Perhaps this was Alex and Si’s ultimate brilliance, as the suggestion was so out of the box and appealed so much to my heart, it blew everything else out of consideration. On the way to Kennedy Airport Si must have sat there fully marinating what my departure to HB would mean to him, not just in losing me at VF but in gaining a horrible competitor for Vogue. I tried to stay calm.

  “That’s very, very kind, Si,” I said. “And I appreciate it very much. I need to discuss this with Mort.”

  When I told Mort, he whistled and then laughed. “Now,” he said. “Let me take care of the rest.”

  Friday, June 9, 1989

  This morning Mort told me I should come over and see him.

  As I hopped out of the town car to see “my lawyer,” I felt the thrill of the big time. Mort had done some further negotiations with salary parity with Hearst and was poring over a pocket calculator. He told me Si had asked for a five-year contract but I should only do three. “If you let me loose in the marketplace, I could call Pete Peterson at Blackstone [the private equity group] and raise fifty million in ten minutes for a start-up. I’ll get this typed up and get it around to Si.” I left Mort’s office in an altered state. In the evening, with H still in California, I went to a movie with my dear Gary Bogard, who was in town. It had a symmetry. It’s almost exactly ten years since he hired me to be editor of Tatler at twenty-five. And somehow, for old time’s sake, it felt right to talk it all through with the man who started off my editing career. Gary was proud and full of admiration and not a bit wistful.

  Si got off the Concorde at nine thirty a.m. By ten twenty he and Mort had talked. At ten thirty Mort called me and said, “It’s a done deal. He also said you’re eligible for a Condé Nast dress allowance. You’re home, baby.”

  So this is the day I will never forget as long as I live, the day I made my quantum leap. The day I joined the boys club. Head spinning so much I haven’t even called Mum and Dad yet to tell them their money worries are over.

  I waited for the call from Si and when it came I went up and hugged him. I wanted this to be emotional, but in fact by this time I already felt something new—a more independent woman. A confidence that wasn’t here before. Thanks to Mort, five years in I am now paid six hundred thousand a year on a three-year contract with a million-dollar bonus at the end, plus my parents taken care of and no debt on our apartment. It is better than my wildest dreams. It feels good that I got it through hard work, strong nerves, careful strategy, and an eye to the future. Those crazy dinner parties where the game of money and value is so vociferously discussed by the men turned out to be my listening tour of the way deals get done.

  Si was affable. His self-possession recovered. He is smart enough to know he had made a good business decision himself. He hadn’t just stopped me from leaving. He’d stopped me from revamping Bazaar and thereby damaging Vogue. Had I done that, it would have cost him a lot more, so it was worth it to Condé Nast. I am sure he discussed it with his shrewd brother.

  “I’m sorry you had to be surprised by all this,” I said. “I guess whenever you see Janklow, you know it’s trouble.”

  “I rather like Mort,” said Si indifferently. “You were right to go to him. It was the right thing to do.”

  I felt I have won more respect by pressing him to compete. No one but mega-Mort would have made him do it and still had us emerge on good terms. “The bad news is you’ve got ten pages fewer in your next issue,” he said.

  “Screw the next issue,” I said.

  “Is that the spirit of our new arrangement?” he said, with some amusement.

  I didn’t reach Frank Bennack till today in Lake Tahoe. I told him the truth, that it was mainly personal. The demands of Georgie, making another turnaround too disruptive to family life. I didn’t feel I could tell him about Mum and Dad. He was disappointed, but very gracious as he always is. “I’ll give you peace now,” he said, “but not for long. I hope we can work together later on, Tina.”

  “Frank,” I said. “So do I.”

  But I feel happy and calm. I know in my heart I belong with Condé Nast. Si annoys me, exasperates me, but he never bores me. When I came out of his office Alex rushed out of his.

  “Darling!” he exclaimed. “Never lose you. Never.”

  So a new chapter begins. Harry came in from LA and we had a romantic dinner together in Quogue on the deck outside. He teased me about how he will now throw his cape in front of me to walk on like Sir Walter Raleigh with Elizabeth I. I told him I couldn’t
have achieved any of this without his belief in me. And it’s true. We toasted our good fortune and went for a long, happy walk on the beach like we did the night before we got married.

  I called Mum and Dad in Spain and told them they should stop worrying about what happens when they can’t manage San Jorge anymore. Mum was jubilant and Dad was almost too moved to speak. I realized how much it’s been worrying him. “I don’t know what to say,” he finally said. There was a tinge of ruefulness. Despite his relief, accepting this from his daughter is hard for his masculine pride. I stressed there was no need to move until they are ready. But the fact is, if this windfall hadn’t happened, when their own money runs out in Spain they’d be on their way to a studio apartment in Hounslow. It’s wonderful to be able to help get them something they deserve to live in when the time comes.

  Sunday, July 2, 1989

  Georgie today was so ineffably sweet, so delicious, I’ve loved him more than I can bear. Harry took him off for a walk on the beach on his shoulders, before bath splashing, high tea, and blissful bedtime with the sunset and the murmuring sea outside the window of his little room. Occasionally we could hear the distant bump of Pumpkin and Bagel, the two cats—who now come out with us every weekend—pursuing insects and imaginary creatures around the porch and colliding with the furniture.

  I spoke to Mum and Dad in Spain, preparing to go over to London for a trip, and found to my consternation that Dad has had a dizzy spell and was told he needs a pacemaker. It’s as if my psychic brain knew this was coming and propelled me into the Condé Nast megadeal. I have gone from the euphoria of success to the sadness of times changing. I hope, I hope he gets some more years before the good times end.

  On Monday I went to a memorial service for poor Jonathan Lieberson. He finally, at forty, lost his fight against AIDS. It’s another tragic culling of a man so many thought was special. His memorial reflected it. In front of me was a freshly face-lifted Jackie O in a white schoolgirl shirt and black skirt, along with the Duchins, Brooke Astor, Richard Avedon, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, the actor Peter Eyre, Diane von Furstenberg, etc. etc. And of course a stricken Bob Silvers of The New York Review of Books, who always saw Jonathan as his successor. It was Bob who choreographed the short tributes by the Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel, Shelley Wanger, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jason Epstein, and Brooke Astor. As at all memorial services, the most interesting things were what was unsaid. How beneath the array of speakers’ claims for his talents as philosopher, editor, and critic, “his essay on Wagner that could stand next to Shaw’s,” Jonathan was ultimately a thwarted soul, his verbal brilliance undermined by his incapacitating self-hatred that perhaps came from a distaste for his own homosexuality, which he always kept implacably hidden. It’s tragic that he felt such shame. He never uttered the word “AIDS” to anyone, and the obituary said “cardiac arrest.” In the end it’s the bitterest irony that he had a slow, agonizing, and public death that finally proclaimed to everyone what he had kept hidden for so long.

  All week I’ve woken up in the night, thinking with vague panic about Jonathan. Why, I’m not quite sure. He wasn’t a special friend. Our relationship began horribly. I fired him and he was bitter about me in the drawing rooms in which I now thrive. But somehow despite all this rancor we came to like each other, or at least appreciate each other. I could see that his wit was pretty rare in the irony-free corporate world I have to spend too much time in, and, starved as I am of European magpie-ism, I was always entertained and refreshed by his eclectic range. And he came to respect Vanity Fair’s success if not me.

  Brooke Astor was the best speaker because she didn’t laud his braininess. Instead she remembered a day just before Christmas when he came to lunch and simply amused her and gave her “oh, the most wonderful gift, his company, for three solid hours.” Standing behind the lectern in her ladylike hat and white gloves, the only one in such an outfit, enunciating clearly into the close summer afternoon, she brought such understanding and clarity to the meaning of social value. She lent an air almost of defiance, as if emphasizing that being an intellectual who wrote good book reviews was not the point of Jonathan at all. Because she was right, she was by far the most memorable.

  Thursday, July 6, 1989

  Quogue

  I love how New York changes so completely in the summer. It’s my favorite time of year here, sitting at my wooden desk before the open window with the cool sea breeze.

  The August issue arrived by FedEx. The Jackie O cover story, and Michael Milken’s rise and fall by Marie, is a much more commercial combo than July. To generate some summer heat I assigned Ed Klein to do Jackie to mark her sixtieth birthday. I asked him because he was always going on about how she liked him when he edited The New York Times Magazine. “What did she say when you called her?” I’d asked.

  “She said, ‘Oh, Ed, give me a break,’” he replied. Ed is so totally impervious to social temperature that he took that as his cue to barrel ahead. But then again that’s probably his value. Jackie has every writer in such a stranglehold of sycophancy and terror, it takes a journalistic Clouseau like Ed Klein to get a cover story that everyone nonetheless will want to read at the beach. Just before we were going to press I glimpsed the Life August issue and was dismayed to see they had a very similar cover image of Jackie and it was too late to change ours. But not too late to change our cover line. Originally we wrote, “The Other Jackie O,” which was such a lazy, predictable effort I don’t know how it survived our critical disgust. The tension of necessity can often produce more creative solutions. In a surge of irritation with all the Jackie hagiography, I changed it to “Jackie, Yo! You’re rich, you’re gorgeous, and along comes Maurice!” (Tempelsman, her boyfriend.) It leapt out of the FedEx bag with good attitude.

  Monday, July 10, 1989

  NYC

  Shoumatoff’s piece on the end of Stroessner in Paraguay, “The Fall of the Tyrannosaur,” is A-plus, an incredible lead for the all-important September issue we are working on now. It’s amazing how little America cares about what happens in this region. Harry says James Reston once commented that people will do anything for Latin America except read about it. And yet the stories are numerous, rich, and crazy. Stroessner had Paraguay in his grip for thirty-four years but no one paid much attention to the fact that his paranoid witch hunts of “communists” gave Paraguay the highest number of unsentenced prisoners in the Western hemisphere, many of them subject to terrifyingly inventive torture. Shoumatoff has collected such chilling stuff, getting into the walled Arabian palaces of Asunción’s elite and the expat Nazi communities in Nuevo Germania. It’s full of sinister echoes. He calls Paraguay “the most refined culture of deceit on the planet except possibly Hollywood.”

  I was up till four in the morning on Sunday rewriting Kevin Sessums’s story on the Rolling Stones wives for the same issue. It had to be as good in its way as Shoumatoff is on the fall of Stroessner. Unless low is as strong as high in VF, we blow the intelligence pact with readers. The Stones piece was my brainchild, all because of a cover line that hit me in the bath: “The Women Who Still Sleep with the Rolling Stones” (it’s the “Still” that makes it great), and then I had to assign a story to match it. I loved the idea of revisiting the old rock-and-roll chicks who have stuck around, with Annie’s wonderful pictures.

  The computer and fax machine in my study were humming all weekend.

  In the middle of it all, Georgie, being spookily sensitive to atmosphere in the house, sensed I’d shut him out to work and kept waking up every ten minutes and screaming. In the end I had to lay him on the floor next to my desk where he could watch me working, no doubt a resentful memory he will harbor long into adolescence.

  Tuesday, July 25, 1989

  On our way back from London to New York after a troubled week. Dad had another vertigo spell and was told he had to have a pacemaker op immediately. He had it done on Wednesday and went back yesterday—his birthday—to have his stitches out. While
he was out, Mum got a call from Dr. Stuttaford about another test. A urine sample for his prostate check. To our chagrin Stuttaford told us the change in his enzyme in the blood indicated “further prostatic activity,” meaning there is very likely a malignancy. Poor dear Dad, after thinking he was over his ordeal and feeling so excited about the new freedom from money worries, now finds everything cloudy and frightening. It was an awful seventy-sixth birthday. He, of course, was brave and jovial as he could be.

  “Unsettling” is the word for the whole trip. The best part of the seventieth birthday party for Frank Giles, Harry’s deputy at The Times, was talking to the historian Asa Briggs about Richard Nixon. “I think he will be like Richard III,” said Briggs. “Nixon will have his demonology. But also his admirers in every century.” As Harry works on the weekends on his new book of political history, The American Century, and as books get written about his years at The Times, I have come to realize that history is only point-of-view journalism about dead people. There is no objective truth about anything. This is what Nixon meant when Henry Kissinger in White House Years says, “History will treat you differently, Mr. President.” And Nixon replies, “It depends who writes it.”

  I brought Miles with me as an excuse to give him a trip to London for a vacation. I am very worried about him. He’s had sudden inexplicable rashes all over, which alarm me. In the middle of Nicholas Coleridge’s wedding he broke it to me that he wants to leave VF and return to London. This news would make my heart stop except I am so worried about him. I think he should leave New York. There is no future for him alone in a burnout environment, going to funerals every week. It’s perilous for his health and I will do everything I can to help him move.

  Felt blue on return to Quogue. G was very contrary all afternoon as I dutifully accompanied him with H to feed the ducks, go to the playground, etc. Felt the burden of relentless good mummy–dom and ached to be reading my Doctorow novel.