by Tina Brown
Sunday, November 26, 1989
Liz Smith, as expected, wrote a dyspeptic column about the Nigel dinner picked up by the LA Times as “British Humor Rankles the Hoity-Toity in New York,” full of sententious finger-wagging about how Americans just don’t find this kind of thing funny.
Now on the plane to LA. I decided after G’s flu last week that it wouldn’t be fair to drag him on and off planes, but it’s the first time I have left him as long as five days. Our favorite thing to do is to go to Story Hour at the Quogue Library, where a soppy redhead with big legs and a woolen dirndl reads children’s books to a small circle of tots who listen on beanbags on the floor. I love the smell of the library in the afternoon, as it starts to get dark outside. It reminds me of being the undergrad in the Bodleian, huddling serene and sexless in a big sweater with Jane Austen books strewn around. When do I set free my inner Quogue Library lady? A few weeks without my trainer dragging me out of bed at six, a few forgotten visits to Louis Licari, in two months I would be a big girl in thick glasses with a bushy ponytail. How lovely that sounds.
But instead, like for Leonard Lauder, it’s onward and upward with the id.
I am now thirty-six. A serious age. Or rather an age to be serious. “You’ll find,” said Bob Hughes, “you’ll be able to be more and more yourself from now on. That’s the blessing of precocity. You’ll be able to shed so many fears and self-censorings that youth inflicts, yet have the wisdom early success brings.” The Philip Larkin thought: “Someone will always be discovering in himself the hunger to be more serious.” I feel that now. I am getting impatient with the things that don’t count at work, the lightweight elements in the mag are not what I want to focus on. I want to publish the best piece from the Prague Spring, the best piece from El Salvador, to honor David Blundy. Would The New Yorker be more intellectually satisfying? These feelings are compounded by the grimness as well as the headiness of our times. The thrill of the developments in Eastern Europe makes me hanker to be there. East Berlin is falling away. German reunification is inevitable. Soon stifling Soviet repression on half a country will feel like inconceivable sepia history. There’s no doubt in my mind that Europe in the nineties is going to be the most alive place to be, and we will see a huge rejection of the America of the eighties.
Monday, November 27, 1989
My chameleon self arrives in LA. I brought Peter Boyer with me so he could infiltrate my contacts. He’s a fantastic hire and will beef up our media coverage a lot. He’s a southern boy, the son of a preacher (not just a Dusty Springfield song as it turns out) who feels he’s always battling the conspiracy of liberal media, which is a bit of a laugh given where he worked and where he works now. I’ve got him on the Sony story, to which I have solemnly donated the size-of-one’s-dick comment from Peter Guber, in the hopes Peter can get him to say it again on the record. He was deeply satisfied to meet all the people who try to avoid his calls, and now that I have introduced him to them in person, they have to talk to him.
Tuesday, November 28, 1989
Ovitz asked me in to see the new CAA I. M. Pei building in Beverly Hills. Sitting in the lobby, gazing at the enormous Lichtenstein mural waiting to go up, was like being in a Florentine square in the afternoon. It has a kind of clean serenity with the bustle of work in the beehive levels above. Every so often an agent comes out to the gallery and leans over like Romeo, casing the lobby.
I had dinner with Barry Diller, who keeps up the Fox interest. He is still fulminating about Fox president Leonard Goldberg’s work ethic, saying that every morning at eight fifteen as he drives to the studio he passes Leonard and his wife, Wendy, going the other way on their morning health walk. “It says it all for me,” said Barry. “Going in the wrong fucking direction! And by the time he has showered and shaved he won’t be in the office until ten, while my film company is going up in flames!” A nice whiff of what it’s like to work for Barry. He took every opportunity to defenestrate Si as an untrustworthy boss: “He’s like Herbie Allen, who recently talked in an interview about the ‘hired hands’ who work for him. It made me crazy! But it’s true of all second-generation billionaires. And mark my words, these ugly Condé Nast firings are all about anger, anger at being short and unworthy and trying to show control after years of having none.” Well, Barry is working for a dynastic billionaire, too. Wonder how long he will survive with Rupert Murdoch. I know whom I would rather work for.
Back at the Bel-Air, I saw through the half-open door of Suite 118 Ted Turner and Kirk Kerkorian, locked in negotiations about MGM. Ted hollered through the door at a hovering flunky, “Bring me that fax!” This morning as I came out of the breakfast room with Caroline Graham and Jane, I whipped around and saw Ted striding by to the exit, his coat over his shoulders, a fierce light in his eye. “Ted!” I shouted. “Thanks for posing for the Hall of Fame!” “You look great,” he said with a girl-appraising look as he kept walking.
Saturday, December 2, 1989
This was a glamorous day by any standards. It began with a meeting with Michael Jackson and ended with sitting next to Clint Eastwood at dinner.
I couldn’t believe the Jackson meeting came through. When he posed for Annie for the Hall of Fame, I had romanced the hell out of his middleman, Bob Jones, during our pursuit. David Geffen also put a word in.
Sure enough at two o’clock today, Jane Sarkin and I were on our way to an anonymous apartment block on Wilshire Boulevard where Michael sometimes hides out. I am sure Michael had motives for seeing me other than delivering for Jones—feeling perhaps it’s time he made an appearance outside his current elephant-man facade to show to someone influential that he is a compos mentis star. Combined with curiosity perhaps. My good terms with the producer Berry Gordy had afforded me the original connection to Michael, which would generate some trust. And the press is so predatory and tormenting to him, he must have felt the Hall of Fame tribute was something that at least honored his art.
Jane and I were let into a half-empty high-rise apartment, which had a train set and a stuffed lion on the floor. We sat doing small talk with Bob Jones when someone slipped in, someone tall with a fast, stooping walk, wearing a cowboy hat. He slid onto the sofa in front of us. “Hi,” a high voice said. We were looking at Michael Jackson, wearing full makeup, with long tendrils of black hair and two curling locks stuck to each cheek with masking tape, and a huge round Band-Aid on the side of his nose. He kept looking away as he talked but was chattering affably, which astonished me because I had expected a mute weirdo who signed an autograph and vanished. “I just wanted to meet a very kind lady,” he said in his high, soft voice. “What you did, putting me in the Hall of Fame, I was so honored.” He stayed with us for an hour. In fact it was I who had to leave.
I got him to talk about composing.
“‘Billie Jean’ came to me when I was driving down Ventura and suddenly the opening bars, the arrangement, the words, all of it, all together, came like a gift. All at once. That’s why I don’t understand arrogance. A gift is from God. I don’t have anything to do with that gift choosing me. It could have been someone else.” It didn’t sound sappy or faux humble. I think he’s a Mozartian kind of genius. A weird innocent with the combined power of both otherworldliness and utter worldliness. “I’m thinkin’ of doing a movie. I like to watch Steven Spielberg. He lets me watch and he’s thinkin’ of somethin’ for me … with Disney.” (Michael Eisner said that when Michael calls up and says in that child’s voice, “Hi!” he can’t help falling into the same voice with a waiflike “hi” in return. At which Jacko shoots back, in a very different, and normal tone, “Don’t talk in my voice!”) He told us he’s trying to find the modern way to do a musical that isn’t MTV and isn’t the old-fashioned segue-into-song that contemporary audiences find ridiculous. I asked him how he comes down to earth after his incredible live performances. “I read,” he said, “in my hotel room. O. Henry sometimes. Frank O’Hara.” Not exactly the world’s image of him. But strangely gratifying a
t the same time.
A talent as enormous as his is bound to be strange after so many years of supercelebrity, where all the boundaries of how you are expected to behave disappear. His gift, like that of anyone world-class, is fostered by lonely discipline, obliterating obsession, and the desperate drive for the extinction of ego by the gift itself.
But here’s the paradox. In some ways Michael is less weird than people want him to be. Not just his surprising literary tastes. During the course of this trip I learned he talks to Geffen and Ovitz and the entertainment lawyer John Branca as well as Eisner about his career and his projects. For someone supposedly a whacky naïf, those are canny advisers to seek out. There’s a lot of shrewdness to his intuitions.
Wendy Stark’s dinner followed this epic encounter.
Clint as a dinner partner—quiet, watchful, instinctive. Also hard work. Long, taciturn silences. A kind of heavy chivalry, calling me ma’am. Said nothing memorable. How could one be bored after one course with the world’s biggest heartthrob? I was. I was glad to switch places to sit with the profane, volcanic Ray Stark. We had a rapprochement after our Puttnam feud. Actually feuds are the stuff of life for Ray. His latest vendetta is against Siskel and Ebert for their review of Steel Magnolias. Apparently one of them said on TV, “I moon this movie,” with a thumbs-down.
“I am going to write him a three-page letter,” fumed Ray, “and say, anyone who moons this movie is an asshole.” I was glad we mended our feud.
My favorite guest at dinner was the Lethal Weapon producer Joel Silver. What a character, with his black leather trousers and thrusting beard. “I read nothing anymore,” he shouted. “Only coverage. Maître d’ gives me a menu and I tell him, bring me the coverage!” When I fall into bed in my Bel-Air room, apricot sheets turned back, two chocolate mints at the bedside, another wicker basket with hot tea on a tray, I feel free and happy in a way I rarely do in New York.
The only thing missing is my darling, curly-haired G breathing softly at my side.
Tuesday, December 19, 1989
Sharon is becoming hard to handle. The carnage of weeping copy editors and fuming art assistants after she has closed a piece suggests it may be time for one of PVZ’s deftly choreographed “conversations.” But I continue to value her. She has the best intellect and judgment on a story when she’s not trying to wage some personal war against someone else’s. Plus she has strong bonds with some of the best writers, such as Richardson, Shoumatoff, and Schiff. (Though I sense Stephen is getting weary of the drama.) I took her to lunch at the UN Plaza and suggested a sabbatical. She was thrilled.
Thursday, December 21, 1989
Finally escaping for Christmas! What a pantomime of an exit! We were supposed to go to London for three days first, but just before leaving heard of a flu epidemic that’s hospitalizing half the country, so G and I are flying direct to Spain to see Mum and Dad and Harry is going to London to deliver presents to his kids and then join us. We need a break. All he does is work on his book, and I am so overscheduled we are both on short fuses.
I had a sad evening this week when Anna Wintour and I had a good-bye party at the Royalton for Gabe and Miles, who are both leaving New York. Miles to get a life back and then look for something. Gabe has found New York too tough and accepted a job from Nick Coleridge back at Tatler. I sat between Miles and Gary Bogard, who was in town. A real Tatler reunion and very nostalgic for days that seem so long ago. I am going to miss Miles so much. And Gabe. Miles is one of my best and real friends, we have been through so much together. It was such a funny, touching party after a frenetic week, closing the issue with Gail Sheehy’s fantastic piece on Gorbachev, and Boyer’s Sony piece that will bring me untold flak.
There was a fiery office debate about whether to risk sales and enrage the PR by dumping the Ellen Barkin cover in favor of Gorbachev. The circulation department was dead against Gorby. I went with it anyway. It feels exactly the right moment to catch the wave. Gorby said at the Malta summit with Bush, “The characteristics of the Cold War should be abandoned.” Which is pretty epic stuff. Gorby is the man of the hour. I want to see that charismatic birthmark on our cover. Plus it’s a good political pivot for us, choosing the man who ended the Soviet Union over this month’s flavor of the month. This is the direction I want to take VF into now, news in its broadest sense. Found a strong, compelling head shot of Gorby and never felt better about a cover decision.
Miles and Gabé’s party was full of love. Miles always moaned and groaned about having no friends, but the Royalton filled up fast with his world, downtown fashion stars and scrappy number twos in art departments, all the talented comers who get squeezed out sometimes from the pages of big, booming VF and are the rising stars at hipper shops. It was fun to hang with them. I get sick of big shots. Gabé wrote me a fond good-bye letter on Vogue scrap paper. “I too am sorry I never made it to VF but I look forward to running Tina Brown productions.” Dear Gabé, dear Miles! Tatler was such a permanent bonding for all of us.
Chris Garrett has moved here permanently and is working for Harry at Traveler. Sarah Giles is now being interviewed for a senior job in features at Harper’s Bazaar. Scary if she takes it. They are a crack squad, and the core of them are the Tatler Brits. Soon they will be competing with me all over town. But this night we were all just joined by the past. It made me cry.
At the annual Condé Nast holiday lunch party at the Four Seasons, Si was in classic form. He got up and started on a metaphor about mountain climbing and how there were more mountains ahead, and there were rocky foothills, until after a bit he realized he was in a total muddle and could never sustain it and abruptly sat down. Then he came over to my table, where I was sitting with Alex, and he banged his head on the hanging poinsettia. Bernie Leser’s speech was some genial blather about corporate spirit. In the middle Alex started to giggle because he decided that Bernie looked like Paganini. This was my sixth Condé holiday lunch. I saw the new editor at Self, Alexandra Penney, staring around in a perplexed way, unsure how to handle a corporate culture so full of eccentrics. Anna looked particularly gorgeous in a red suit and very high heels. She has such powerful allure, such a presence. We traveled in the car together to lunch. Looking at her, wrapped unapologetically in a Fendi fur, exuding the expensive halo of Chanel perfume, and talking in her terse, businesslike voice, I could see why she casts a spell.
Thursday, December 28, 1989
Spain
What an odd Christmas. Mum and Dad had told me of the incredible rain in Spain not staying in the plain but swamping the coast. Somehow I had not fully appreciated the degree. Their unwinterized holiday villa is totally unfit for these storms. The creeping discomfort of it has been compounded by the freak weather into something fearfully bad for Dad’s health. He should have stayed in London and not come back here. A few days of sun cheered it all up, but at nightfall the house was chilly, and the huge gas fires that they wheel about from room to room, saying brightly, “So much cozier than central heating,” cannot take the dank feel from the house. Towels are always slightly wet, the kitchen, always Mum’s disastrous blind spot, is now something out of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, with its ancient toasted sandwich machine and cracked coffee cups. I felt I have become an American snob, overused to creature comforts. I reminded myself Brits are always freezing in drafty houses. None of it would have really mattered, however, if the pipes hadn’t burst, creating a river straight into the village and making Dad the subject of a denunciamento to the local police.
All this stress is causing Dad to deteriorate. I fear that stubbornly continuing to live here is now shortening his life a good deal and now that we can afford it, it’s time to make the big move back to London. The place is a nightmare of daily hassles, and he is half out of it. He got quieter and quieter during the course of the week, a faded version of his usual vigor.
Mum is locked into her usual “All’s well” facade. I honestly believe that when Dad is in the terminal ward she will refer
to it as an “exciting new phase.” When the heavens opened on day four, seeping into one’s very bone marrow, she said, “Of course London is so much colder, darling. New York is so freezing, too, and a little bit of rain is nothing!” A little bit of rain? The house is slowly sliding down the hill! One especially poignant moment from this holiday from hell: the sight of Dad in his tweed Little Marlow hat, standing outside with two workmen with pickaxes. In his hand I can see something that looks like a vacuum cleaner he is waving over the muddy ground. I realize it’s the metal detector Mum bought him for his birthday thirty years ago when we were obsessed with the notion that there was an Anglo-Saxon burial ground in the field behind us in Little Marlow, full of silver buckles and shoulder clasps. Now the treasure he seeks is broken sewage pipes. I doubt San Jorge will fetch more than seventy-five thousand at this point. I feel a certain rage that they kept from me the dilapidated state of the house. What if I hadn’t got the money from Si?
Mum and Dad’s systematic denial of the truth all my life is perhaps where I get my savage realism. I still can’t believe Mum told me only five years ago that Dad’s father was not, as we were always told, Christopher Brown, my brother’s namesake and the manager of the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand. Dad’s real father was a musical comedy star named George Layton, who had an affair with our grandmother when she was eighteen. That’s why as a baby Dad slept in the hamper in her dressing room—there was no one home to mind him.