by Tina Brown
Wednesday, January 16, 1991
War broke out with Iraq just as we were on our way to a dinner with, of all people, Henry and Nancy Kissinger at the River House. With CNN’s reports of the aerial bombing campaign of military targets blazing in the background, we milled (inevitably) with Rupert and Anna Murdoch. (Oh, the wheel of fortune. Rupert’s huge papier-mâché face has imploded with debt crunch. Anna is tight around the eyes with pretending not to worry.) TVs were on in every room. And all attempts to talk about anything else were abandoned. Dinner was postponed till after Bush and Cheney spoke at nine o’clock. When the TV set in the living room had too many people watching it, Henry K, Harry, Chessy Rayner, the TV journalist Barbara Howar, and I went upstairs and plunked on Henry and Nancy’s huge orthopedic bed with a view of books and a dog basket. Henry was in charge of the remote. “NBC’s analysis is superior, but CNN for the news breaks,” he rumbled, flipping back and forth. “Nightline keeps calling,” he added to Nancy. “Shall I go on?”
“Will they put Cheney on by ten thirty?” fretted Nancy in her long drawl. “The meat will spoil.”
“Put it on a slow gas,” growled Henry. And as Gerald Ford came on, he added, “I hear there’s a great movie on at eleven. Heh-heh.”
Harry sensed tension between Murdoch and Barry Diller, doing such an amazing job running Fox. No doubt it’s because Barry got the stock up with the network success, and then Rupert’s TV Guide blunder and Sky Channel madness have forced it down again. Diller expresses himself so well and colorfully, whatever the gravitas of the situation it makes me smile. “Did that terrible Bonfire of the Vanities movie make any money?” John Gutfreund asked him. “Fifty million dollars gone Venezuela,” Barry replied with an urbane smile. His judgment of our Lew Wasserman piece was one to remember for a tombstone epitaph … “There was great dust in his wake.” So was another epigram about the changes Harry needs to make at Random House: “There is nothing to protect except going out of business.”
He and Diane von Furstenberg kept exchanging knowing looks across the table. They have a Les liaisons dangereuses bond, it seems—today’s Valmont and Merteuil. A complicity of past secrets now mellowed into worldly friendship that continues to advance both.
It was surreal having dinner with this lot as bombs exploded on the multiple screens. Arguments at the table over who is best—Rather, Brokaw, or Jennings—but CNN wins hands down. (I am addicted to Peter Arnett.)
We commented on the commentators, on who was ahead and who behind, as though they were players on a sports team. That was part of the unreality, too. There we were, watching this massive attack as if it were a movie or a game, some strange new form of entertainment. I realized nothing like this had ever happened on TV before, not in real time. Real people were dying, six thousand miles away from the River House, and what we felt was mainly excitement at the spectacle. I looked around at these titans of media, government, and society. None of them was at risk here. None of them had a son or daughter over there, or any real skin in the game—and game it was to them, and even to me. Is this what war feels like now to all of us who don’t serve—remote and weirdly beautiful, with only the reassuringly familiar faces of our favorite news stars to connect us to this distant, enormous event?
On such a night of high points and subtext I love my job, which allows me to be there and then walk away and assign what I learned. We were home early as the River House is so close, and then it was back to more CNN, more Gulf War in our pajamas.
Thursday, February 14, 1991
In flight, London to New York
On my way back from launching Vanity Fair in London. Hated leaving my darling baby girl so much and am still pumping breast milk—a horrible wrench. I love holding her in my arms late at night and staring at her sweet, plump mouth and happy smile. Now that they’ve sold the house in Spain, Mum and Dad are settled into their elegant new apartment in St. John’s Wood. So the only consoling thing in having to leave Isabel was that it enabled me to bring Mum the very latest pictures of her new granddaughter.
Because of the Gulf War, the plane was entirely empty except for Barbara Walters. That was a girl-power statement. Everyone else chickened out of flying, but we didn’t. She was going over to get some scoop interview. There is a reason she is on top.
In the office, we talked at first about canceling the VF launch event. Everything is in such panic and disarray with travel plans and doubt about “what’s appropriate.” Then we thought, fuck it, Dunkirk spirit, we won’t do a big launch event, but a series of small things to say VF has arrived in London. I took the usual indefatigable team of VF talents who are such great promoters and ambassadors and now work so well together, it’s like the Rockettes on a school outing. We divided and conquered with a series of promotion parties in London (all paid for by the hosts, which was better still in austere times). As I raced through empty streets in a black taxi, I felt like Pamela Harriman in the blitz on my way to see Edward R. Murrow. I half expected to see handsome young airmen in uniform kissing backlit blondes good-bye in doorways.
One of the things I always forget about London is how wonderfully louche it is compared to NYC. Brits get to the restaurant for lunch at one and leave at three forty-five, slightly drunk and wreathed in cigarette smoke, instead of, as in Manhattan, bolting from the restaurant at two o’clock, leaving half a Caesar salad and a glass of Perrier. Nigel Dempster’s “Who’s Saddam fucking?” was the closest anyone got to the Gulf crisis during the hack lunch, which actually was the best of all the occasions because writers are the best tribe, bar none, especially these—Auberon Waugh, Margaret Drabble, Michael Holroyd, Angela Huth, Melvyn Bragg, Tony Holden, Michael Roberts, and dear Martin (Amis), in thoughtful mood.
When I read the London coverage I was thrilled but also depressed, as I scarcely recognized who they were writing about, viz my “frosty professional patina,” my “power mask,” my “chilly charm,” etc. It reminded me how loose and informal the Brits are and how I have to play against that acquired American buttoned-up image all the time (even though it’s taken so long to put in place). Most Americans don’t realize there are two ways to answer a question. Question: “With the recession and the war, is this a good time to launch a new glossy magazine called Vanity Fair?” American answer: “Well, it may look inauspicious, but all the market trends are nonetheless in our favor. There’s a definite niche for a blah-blah-blah.” English answer: “No. It’s a perfectly awful moment. In fact, when I read about the snowstorm I thought, my God, we scored a hat trick.” I knew I would get asked about the embarrassment of Spy publishing the suck-up letter I wrote to Ovitz, trying to get him to sit down for a profile with Jesse Kornbluth. The leaking thing is a drag. I have received so many similar gushing letters myself, requesting interviews, that pretend to care about my literary taste rather than asking for the glitz piece they really want, and TV bookers write them all the time. But it’s sweaty, as Martin would say, to see it leaked. And I was dopey to send it under my name. At least I was ready for the question. When the cocky Jonathan Ross asked me about it, I just said I sent the same letter to Saddam Hussein.
We did a lunch for the fashion crowd, who were such a funny bunch en masse—Bruce Oldfield, Manolo Blahnik, Roberto Devorik, Hardy Amies all bitching and moaning about business being bad instead of, as we do in NYC, pretending it’s good. Roberto Devorik kept shouting: “Let’s face it, business is sheet! It is sheet!”
“This blotty George Bush,” Manolo postured. “His Hollywood war! His Mary Quant bombs that are supposed to smell nice and not kill anybotty. I think he is a mass murderer and that is final!” (The next day we read about the US bombing of four hundred civilians in an Iraq air raid and Manolo’s joke looked horribly prescient.) Hoary old Hardy Amies was at first mystified as to who Reinaldo was, because in Europe Reinaldo uses his operatic Venezuelan title of marqués de Torre Casa.
“I just met someone called the count of Torremolinos,” he told me. “I thought I was the only
titled queen here.” I told him that that was, in fact, Reinaldo Herrera. “Ooh,” he said, “I think I know his mother. I KNOW YOUR MOTHER!” he mouthed across the table, not at Reinaldo but at a baffled Joseph Ettedgui, the designer who was sitting next to him. By week’s end the buzz on the new VF was deafening and the first newsstand check showed a sell-through of 60 percent, which is pretty incredible. The big question now that we’re launched is, will they come back for more?
Sunday, February 17, 1991
Harry’s been in LA to try to sign up Marlon Brando’s memoir. I called him at the Bel-Air hotel last night and he didn’t answer—even at midnight, which started to make me angsty. Some gorgeous girl he encountered in the Bel-Air lobby? Turns out he couldn’t get away from Brando after a bizarre evening of his ranting about Native Americans and how the writer Peter Matthiessen is a CIA agent, while Harry kept delicately trying to get him back around to the memoir. Apparently he is totally paranoid, so Harry omitted to tell him he’s married to the person who published the piece in Vanity Fair he hated by Peter Manso about his son Christian’s murder of his sister’s boyfriend.
They played a two-hour chess game in which Marlon avoided the only thing Harry wanted to talk about: the content of a possible book. When he was again about to leave, Marlon energetically insisted he join him for a midnight swim. His huge bulk floated in the deep end for an hour in pitch darkness with only the sound of Japanese chimes, declaiming Shakespeare as Harry trod water—Mark Anthony’s funeral oration: “Lend me your ears! Emphasis on the ‘lend,’ not the ‘ears,’ Harry.” Then he wanted Harry to stay for a bonding sauna, still declaiming (at 1:30 a.m. and wearing tentlike underpants in the steaming heat) “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I.” At the end of this bizarre publishing quest, NO book agreed, but a promise of “more such congenial conversational occasions, Harry.”
Friday, March 22, 1991
Sonesta Spa, Fort Lauderdale
Snatched up the kids and fled town to Florida. Harry’s Random House sales conference was well timed and we tagged along and stayed after he left. Isabel is the most glorious, affable baby I have ever met. She gurgles and gurgles all day, with her vast satellite-dish eyes and rosebud mouth that eats your arm and slobbers into your neck. She gazes at Georgie in total fascination and he is much more connected to her now. (He kissed her yesterday and when I exclaimed, “How sweet to kiss your sister!” he replied darkly, “I’m giving Isabel my cold.”)
In between I struggle to keep the magazine on its high wire. We did an incredible April issue with Madonna on the cover, shot by Steven Meisel; inside was Marie Brenner on Oscar Wyatt, T. D. Allman on Arafat and the PLO. Meaty, newsy stuff. But then the May issue fell apart and it was like back to the worst old times when we had no lead and wound up having to buy a Marilyn Monroe book extract. This is the endless dice roll of monthly magazines, the dependence on quality that sometimes just does not arrive or disappoints.
I am also brooding how I can make a definitive editorial statement that will distance us from the eighties. A new adrenaline shot. Without explicitly saying so we need to make a turn that’s decisive or we will be defined by the passé Reagan era of glitz and Park Avenue. The nineties is about divestment. About shedding old social structures and pretenses. There’s a lust for a reckoning, too, after all the Wall Street malfeasance. We need to get deeper, darker, more expansive while keeping the joy factor. I am looking for a cover that will do that and have talked about it a lot with Annie.
Harry’s Random House job has added a whole lot of turmoil to our domestic lives. (Turmoil he adores, I have to say.) I forgot it would mean there is a book launch every night that he has to go to, even if I refuse. He did finally, after two more meetings, corral Brando’s memoir. There was a brief crisis last week when Marlon connected that he was married to me and nearly pulled out. “And now comes a large cloud of black crows,” he wheezed down the phone to Harry from LA. “Your wife, I learn, is Tina Brown.” But Harry performed the feat of somehow distancing himself from his wife of ten years and the deal was signed for a mighty $5 million.
Si gave a dinner for David Geffen to try to appease his wrath over Art Cooper’s GQ profile, which had incensed Geffen into taking Paul Marciano to lunch and convincing him to pull all his Guess ads from GQ. (A low blow. Geffen knows how to stick the knife.) I sat between him and Dick Snyder, who is in the middle of a fight for his life at S and S that he probably will not win. It is now obvious that he was destined to implode. I will always be fond of him, perhaps because he was the first publishing power I ever met at that first ABA in Dallas with Ed Victor. I will never forget the image of him walking into the hotel lobby flanked by his S and S court of leggy senior editors and glitzy PR girls. He was such a king. He now has an entirely perpendicular blow-dry and a lobster-tinged complexion. The iconoclastic wit has a destructive edge. It will be bad for him when he is eventually fired, which I sense will not be long.
Tuesday, April 30, 1991
Just back from the wake for Tatiana Liberman at Frank Campbell’s memorial home. Poor Alex! It finally happened. The end of his great love. Her tyranny. The absorption with her. Oscar de la Renta told me, “Two months ago I saw Alex. Tatiana was bedridden, demanding even more than usual. And Alex said to me, ‘If only I could just keep her like this, I’d be so happy.’”
But in the last months as his own health has been failing, the strain has exhausted him. He is waxen. Tonight, in the group of murmuring friends assembled—Pierre Bergé flown in from Paris, Annalee Newman, the widow of the painter Barnett, Joan Buck, Si and Victoria, etc.—Alex sat on a sofa with that stiff, dignified smile he wears when his mind is somewhere else. He took both my hands. “Dear friend,” he said sorrowfully.
How true and real a bereavement makes people become. Francine du Plessix Gray, who has always, I felt, disliked me, and who only two weeks ago snubbed me at the PEN dinner, was animated with grief. “Alex loved your note,” she said with emotion. And we both teared up and talked about how stupid and inadequate the New York Times obituary of Tatiana was, making her sound like a frivolous socialite who only made hats instead of the woman of culture she was and an artist’s muse.
Alex, noble ruin, has seen so much history come and go in the last fifty years.
We went to a fiftieth birthday party for the diplomat Dick Holbrooke last week at the 21 Club, which was social torture, with three toasts before the first course, three before the second, and three before dessert. Actually they were roasts, not toasts, an American tradition that I very much dislike. All the remarks were borderline offensive in a heavy, power-people kind of way. Dick’s son went on about what it was to be the son of a man who’d force Pete Peterson and his wife, Joan Ganz Cooney, to host such a gathering as this. Dick laughed somewhat hollowly throughout as he was described again and again as an egregious social climber. It may be true, but I also love him for his brilliance and bigness of temperament in a smaller and smaller world.
Pondering on why it was such a discomforting night: there’s a new social trend that seems to be about marketing your private life. Every birthday, every anniversary, every baby shower, every wedding is just the excuse for a positioning statement. I knew what we were in for as soon as we entered that big, sententious room at 21 and I saw the podium and the place cards and the microphone waiting ominously. Dick lusts to be secretary of state at some point, so maybe I am wrong and this is what he wanted.
I am now on my way to Vancouver to speak to the American Newspaper Publishers Association at the request of Donald Newhouse. Amazingly, he’s had me picked up in a private plane. They want me to go tell them what’s wrong with American newspapers (where do I start?). It’s a bit of an uncomfortable role as the outsider magazine editor from the UK. According to Steve Newhouse, whom Harry just saw at his Arizona sales conference, they expect me to come in and “kick butt.” Have spent many hours prepping for it.
It’s been interesting to think about why American newspapers are so much l
ess potent than England’s. It’s fashionable here to sneer at the British tabloids, but I grew up on the wit and buoyancy of those headlines and sorely miss them. There’s so much talent on the back bench of British papers, even though often put to such hopelessly meretricious ends. The press vitality there is unbeatable, the flamboyant sense of design, the picture choices, the cropping, the sharp captions. The New York Times is so self-important and badly laid out. The Washington Post is so much better—the Style section has all the flair of European journalism—but what I miss here is the surprise of a Hollywood splash lighting up a news page or an irreverent headline undercutting a pompous public moment. What’s great about Fleet Street is that literary talents like Kingsley Amis or Keith Waterhouse or Auberon Waugh don’t feel above writing both for the popular press and the high-minded or literary press. There is huge snobbery and hand-wringing here about what “serious” papers “should” publish and where writers “should” write. Plus I am always shocked how crappy local American papers look. There needs to be a total overhaul of visual approach and a willingness to entertain popular culture, a more flexible sense of inclusion that doesn’t mean being trashy or they will lose their audiences and die. And they have to get rid of the concept of “women’s pages” and understand women are half their audience and emotional content needs to pervade throughout. The Daily Mail in England has been sensational at that, ruthless and amoral though they may be. Their human angles make every single story, even when about people I don’t give a damn about, totally irresistible to read. Which is what I plan to tell them!
Si warned me that once I sampled it, I’d never want to travel any other way than on a private plane, and how right he was. It was due to take off from Newark at eleven, but it was pouring rain and I arrived at five after, having been told it would take off whenever I got there. Yan, my fave driver from Manhattan Limo, drives me through the electric gates after murmuring my “tail” number (the number on the tail wing; the cats would like that). A smiling stewardess then waves me, and only me, aboard an empty ten-seater Gulfstream with plushy beige leather seats and writing tables and a cornucopia of the day’s papers I am about to trash in Vancouver. Just as we are about to take off, the pilot comes out and says, “Brenda Phipps [my invaluable executive assistant] needs to speak to you.” So I trot downstairs again and into the little private terminal to the phone booth and call her. “I wanted to know,” she says, “what kind of skunk would you like to get for Georgie at FAO Schwarz? The fourteen-dollar one or the sixty-five-dollar one?” “What’s furrier?” I demand. “The sixty-five.” “Go for it,” I said. Returning to my creamy seat on the plane, I tell the crew, “Just a small office crisis,” settling down after takeoff with piping coffee that appears from nowhere. And soon, I am rehearsing my speech at top volume to an invisible audience, only stopping for a reclining nap and to feast alone on chicken and angel-hair pasta, until we reach Vancouver.