by Tina Brown
And now I am at home, waiting for Harry and pacing the apartment. The New Yorker is a weekly. I cannot do this to the kids unless—unless—Mum and Dad would come and live with us in New York. Mum has never failed me when I asked her to do something and perhaps they would. We miss each other more and more, and I sense since Izzy was born Mum longs to be more a part of the family. If Mum and Dad came, it would be a boon for G. They are so wonderful with him, playing endless, patient games. There are the critical three hours when G gets off the school bus from Stephen Gaynor before I can get home. How wonderful if his grandparents could be there to greet him.
I am deeply attached to the VF writers and would be sad to leave them, but there are others I see sporadically in the pages of TNY—Adam Gopnik, the art writer, ought to be doing more than art, he’s clearly got expansive range, and Louis Menand, who’s doing book reviews—I’d like to see him do longer essays. Janet Malcolm is a jewel to keep. So is Roger Angell. Then there are the talents I have spotted elsewhere and long to recruit, some from London. John Lahr, who did the Orton book. He might come over and do theater. I am loving the film pieces in The Independent by the young writer Julie Kavanagh knows, Anthony Lane. He’s almost Waugh-like, and so witty. I could bring the critics section alive. I’d love to hire David Remnick, who writes so fluently about Russia at The Washington Post. He’s been on book leave and we should grab him. I’d need a consigliere who knew the folkways at The New Yorker. Maybe Hendrick Hertzberg at The New Republic, who used to work there in Shawn’s day and is such a brilliant editor as well as writer and still has a lot of friends there I’ve heard. I’d need Sharon DeLano back. She has the intellectual heft to wrestle the big pieces, and Kim Heron, who has come over to VF from The New York Times and is a superb editor. Her Mary McCarthy style would fit the culture, I’m sure. I love the idea of doing reported essays, getting the critics to engage with the world around them and the news, something The New Yorker has the brain power for but rarely does. Gopnik could do those. So could Henry Louis Gates, the black studies professor at Harvard who writes great op eds in the Times. Philip Gourevitch at The Forward is a huge talent I’ve noticed. There are so many fabulous writers out there and there is no more room at VF to publish them all. A weekly means four times as many writers each month! TNY needs to refresh the pool and find new talent just as good as the old. It would take me back to my literary roots at the New Statesman that lately I miss more and more. (Larkin again: the “hunger to be more serious.”) My head is racing now. It would be thrilling to be able to work with John Updike. It would be a joy to work with Brendan Gill. But so much people management with a bigger staff and an apparently arcane system of payment and benefits. I would have to bring Pam McCarthy with me to help me strategize! VF (and I) would fall apart without her … Chris Garrett could take over her role so VF wouldn’t miss a beat with whomever they picked to replace me. I can’t believe I can even write those words, “replace me” … I expect Si will want to keep Nick Dunne and Marie at VF. They are the two defining voices of the mag and at least for a year or two would need to hold it steady.
I picked up a New Yorker on the way home. It would need to visually evolve while keeping its cool beauty. I’d want to bring the Harold Ross flavor and pace, with a today spin. The mag has no photography at the moment except some little tiny pictures in the Goings On About Town section. I would ask Richard Avedon (I have never managed to use him at VF, where he feels crowded out by splashy talents like Annie) to be the one photographer, just him, to open the magazine’s windows. The clarity of his black-and-white images have the same purity as The New Yorker’s Caslon typeface. He could provide just a few pictures from his own archives and sometimes a new portrait, dropped into the text as punctuation points.
Covers! I know from VF there are throngs of untapped illustrators and cartoonists we could use. Art Spiegelman, Ed Sorel, Bruce McCall. I wish Mark Boxer were still alive. He was born to draw for these pages. I need to find black-and-white line drawings that echo his sophistication. And I want to nurture and grow more cartoonists! They are the lifeblood of the mag. I could give them a Holiday Issue all to themselves. The Cartoon Issue. I love it already. And I would heat up the fiction. Not my area of passion, but I could raid Granta and see if its brilliant literary editor Bill Buford wants to move to NYC. He’s a five-hundred-pound gorilla who would probably want my job, but also the kind of alpha talent TNY needs. One thing about the Ross New Yorker that had so much charm was the rubrics that recur: Annals of Personal History. Shouts and Murmurs. I will revive them. Shouts and Murmurs could be a back-page humor column.
My heart begins to race and I close my eyes. In the next room I can hear Izzy wake up and call out for me. But I also hear something else, something I can’t resist: the sweet Gershwin strains of a new opportunity.
EPILOGUE
WHAT HAPPENED LATER
Six months after I wrote that last entry, I walked a block and a half southwest from Condé Nast headquarters on Madison Avenue to a handsome 1920s Beaux Arts building on West Forty-Third Street overlooking Bryant Park. It was June 30, 1992, and as the new, thirty-eight-year-old editor of The New Yorker I was on my way to meet its senior editing staff for the first time.
I was the fourth editor in sixty-seven years and the first woman. It was a clear, sunny day. In a spirit of summer gaiety I wore a polka-dot silk wrap dress and, to boost my confidence, my highest Manolo heels. I didn’t keep a diary of those first insanely hectic six months, but what I remember from that day is a group of about a dozen men—all men, all in horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets—sitting around a board table, eyeing me with poorly concealed mistrust. One participant looked different. A baleful, bony face glared from between curtains of Frank Zappa hair. “I suppose you’ll want to cut down on cartoons?” This, I would soon discover, was Bob Mankoff, the cartoonist.
The next chapter of my editing adventures had begun—six and a half years of thrilling intellectual contentment. With the help of Pam McCarthy to clear the wilderness, I replaced seventy-one of the 120 New Yorker staff with fifty outstanding new talents, all from my original dream list and others we later identified: David Remnick and Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. right off the bat, and over the next two years Malcolm Gladwell, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, James B. Stewart, and Lawrence Wright. We added a sparkling trio of new critics who lit up the back of the book: Anthony Lane on movies, John Lahr on theater, and the British historian Simon Schama on art. As the explosion of media continued, Ken Auletta came aboard to write a column on communications. Skip Gates let us poach his precocious Du Bois Institute protégé, Henry Finder, an eclectic highbrow who would became our books editor and an all-around editorial influence. Far from cutting down on cartoons as Bob Mankoff feared, I promoted him to cartoon editor, gave him an annual all-cartoon holiday issue, and launched the New Yorker Cartoon Bank, which curated for sale the huge archive of cartoons, including thousands that were accepted but never published, producing income not only for the magazine but also for the (sometimes impecunious) cartoonists themselves.
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There were other gems from the old guard who I wanted to stay. Nancy Franklin was an editor whose scalding memos about train-wreck pieces were so funny, I made her our second-string theater critic. The incumbent deputy editor, Charles “Chip” McGrath, proved to have one of the most sensitive set of copy eyes I’d ever encountered. (It was Chip who also wryly helped me translate such coded old-guard responses to an incoming article as “It’s a useful piece,” which meant, of course, the absolute opposite.) Greatest Generation jewels from the old New Yorker such as Lillian Ross and Roger Angell were reinvigorated, existing talent such as the dazzling art critic Adam Gopnik changed their beats (I sent him to Paris) or expanded their range (I harassed Mark Singer into profiling Donald Trump), and, thanks to the new art editor, Françoise Mouly, covers got a new vibrancy and energy (no more Central Park benches with autumn leaves). Her husband, the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphi
c novelist and artist Art Spiegelman, contributed cover images of incendiary intelligence. Through it all I was guided by the essential New Yorker alumnus, Hendrik Hertzberg, who returned from his post at The New Republic in Washington to run the Comment section and help me breathe life back into The New Yorker’s pages while keeping faith with its founding spirit and mission. (One of Rick Hertzberg’s many benefactions was identifying a former New Republic colleague, Dorothy Wickenden, a fierce defender of editorial standards, who became my executive editor and still plays that role for David Remnick.)
None of this happened without tumult. My first three years were an uproar of indignant protests and apocalyptic doomsaying. The fury of not a few veteran ex-staffers coursed through the media, certain that I would sack the sepulcher.
One would think that putting bylines at the beginning of articles instead of at the end heralded the end of civilization. Garrison Keillor noisily quit as I arrived. George W. S. Trow called me “the girl in the wrong dress,” a slur whose meaning, though not its malice, was unclear. To Jamaica Kincaid I was “Joseph Stalin in high heels.” (Jamaica would later return to The New Yorker as our gardening columnist.)
These were the most vociferous responses to change, but they were by no means the most typical. Most of the old staff—some reluctantly, some eagerly—soon adjusted to the new rhythms, the new timeliness, the new visual energy, and their new colleagues. One of my most pleasing days on the job was in the summer of 1996 when the novelist and longtime New Yorker contributor John Updike was in my office for a sandwich. Unfailingly courteous and modest, Updike seldom came down from Massachusetts and didn’t usually stay long. As it happened that week, Anthony Lane was in from London. Anthony, Cambridge-educated and still in his twenties, had quickly become one of the defining voices of the new New Yorker critic roster. He branched out from movie reviews to effervescent reassessments of Henry James and Edward Lear and other writers he referred to (though not in print, of course) as “sad old fucks.” Updike was the literary hero Anthony most yearned to meet. I told him to knock on my door around lunchtime and I would introduce the new contributor to the old. As I did so, Updike rose from his chair and stopped me midflow. “Anthony Lane!” he exclaimed. “I have been wanting so much to meet you!”
At that moment I knew that the editorial graft had taken. There was no longer, as the press narrative usually went, a New Yorker “old guard” pitted against an upstart editor and her “new guard” hires. There was one magazine again—healthy, vital, regenerated, off the critical list. Advertisers returned. Circulation rose by a quarter of a million. The annual deficit steadily declined, going from a huge $18 million to a less huge $12 million (and would finally disappear altogether in 2002, under the business leadership of David Carey). Most important and gratifying, a new generation became readers. In April 1995 we won the Oscar of the magazine world, the General Excellence award, for the first time in The New Yorker’s history.
Something else happened. The New Yorker changed me as much as I changed The New Yorker. It made me more thoughtful, more rigorous, more addicted to excellence. It was satisfying to depart from my own determination to shrink excessively long pieces when the quality demanded something exceptional. Since David Blundy’s death I had followed obsessively the conflict in El Salvador. On December 6, 1993, we devoted an entire issue of The New Yorker to one piece, a fifty-thousand-word investigative report by Mark Danner, “The Truth of El Mozote.” Mark scrupulously revealed that the Salvadoran Army on December 11, 1981, had murdered nine hundred villagers and concealed the atrocity, burying the slaughtered in mass graves, and that the US colluded with the lie that the victims were all communist guerrillas.
All this took collaboration and judgment. I loved the hours of passionate debate in my office with Remnick and Hertzberg and Finder and Pam over the pros and cons of whether to publish a piece or a cover. (One that slipped through the net was my outlandish notion of asking Roseanne Barr to be a “guest editor” of a special issue on women that misfired spectacularly and was aborted by unanimous outrage before publication.)
Si Newhouse, who supported me through the whole raucous literary experiment, was over the moon.
My family life was joyful, too. My parents moved from London to the apartment across the corridor from ours on East Fifty-Seventh Street. That dream of the kids getting in from school and going over to play with their doting “gaga and gumpy” became reality.
In all my successes and misadventures since, the warm strength of family life has been behind every leap of faith I’ve taken. Georgie was finally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in 1995, when he was nine, astonishingly through an article by Oliver Sacks that came to me at The New Yorker. Dr. Sacks wrote about a fascinating, obsessional scientist named Temple Grandin. She manifested so many of our son’s attributes that I knew we had finally found the answer to the riddle of his gifts and his struggles, even before a specialist whom Sacks recommended to us confirmed the medical label. A committed therapist, Dr. Anne Marie Albano, helped transform his ability to empathize, reduce his anxiety, and organize his thoughts. I am happy to report that after many challenges and much support from all who love him, Georgie is an independent, exuberant thirty-one-year-old, living in his own apartment in downtown Manhattan and working at a small nonprofit, where he’s beloved for his quirky humor and affectionate heart. Izzy, meanwhile, flew through Harvard and now works as a news producer at Vice Media. She is as full of life and speed as her unstoppable father, who, at eighty-nine, swims a thousand yards daily, moderates public Newsmaker interviews at Reuters, and in June 2017 published his twelfth book, Do I Make Myself Clear? Now that the kids have left home, Harry and I savor our news-junkie breakfasts together at the local diner, where I get to have his rapid re-edit of the front-page agenda all to myself.
As I look back on the Vanity Fair years I realize that you never know you’re living in a personal golden age until it’s over. I shall always be grateful to Si Newhouse for following his instincts and hiring me, and allowing me, over seventeen years of working for him, to follow my own. Alexander Liberman, ever the improviser, unexpectedly thrived after the death of his wife, Tatiana, marrying her Filipina nurse, Melinda. (He died in 1999, at the age of eighty-seven, in Miami Beach, where he had moved after his remarriage and retirement.)
Miles Chapman continued his editing career in London until he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2002. While researching his illness he discovered at last who his real father was: a Cheshire chef named Cecil Jesse Proudlove. This has proved to him a source of considerable amusement. He now walks with a cane but is mostly unchanged. Sarah Giles died tragically early in 2014 at the age of sixty-three after a cardiac arrest and a stroke. Even though she was wheelchair-bound for her last five years, she held court for friends who came to visit from far and wide. Chris Garrett and Jane Sarkin remain at Vanity Fair still, twin pillars of its prosperity. Pam McCarthy continues, like Atlas, to hold together all the moving parts at The New Yorker. Sharon DeLano now works almost exclusively for Annie Leibovitz, whose worldwide renown requires constant text accompaniment and curation. Michael Roberts joined me as style director of The New Yorker and now continues a Cocteau-like transatlantic career as an acclaimed illustrator, photographer, and journalist. Ron Galotti enjoyed a pop-culture moment when it was revealed he was the real-life model for Mr. Big in Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City. He got out of the magazine business, moved to Vermont, and became a happy and successful farmer and volunteer fireman.
I’ve stayed in close touch with so many of the writers, photographers, and editors I have worked with over the years that sometimes I forget which publication(s) we collaborated on. Some traveled with me on the whole bumpy journey. Gabé Doppelt—who also joined me as Features editor at Talk magazine in 1999 and as West Coast bureau chief at The Daily Beast, the digital news site I founded in 2008—has reinvented herself in the hotel business in LA. I still rely on her high, clear voice on the phone to ruthlessl
y dissect a problem.
It makes me happy that my successors at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Graydon Carter and David Remnick respectively, flourished as editors in chief. David is a natural wonder. Besides editing and supervising a great magazine and its thriving website, he writes as much or more of its content than anyone on his staff and hosts The New Yorker’s popular weekly hour-long radio show. (Nowadays, when I listen to that show and the podcasts and when I see the success of Vanity Fair’s books and documentaries, I feel a certain satisfaction that Condé Nast has finally seen the potential of expanding their brands beyond print.)
Oh, and yes: Anna Wintour reigns forever as queen of Condé Nast.
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The media has changed unrecognizably since the 1980s Valhalla of well-funded editorial confidence, when you could pursue excellence as well as profit in a profession marked by community as well as competition. Stephen Schiff—now executive producer and writer of the hit FX TV show The Americans—was prescient in a 1990 Vanity Fair essay when he suggested that we were all becoming unmoored, atomized “Particle People,” but what he didn’t predict was that media itself would splinter, proliferate, and cull so many of the creative talents on which algorithms depend. Writing brilliant sentences (and editing them) does not have the market value of writing brilliant code, even though, as we learn every day, critical thinking is the DNA of democracy. What no one could have predicted is that even as we are swept toward an unknown future we live in a strangely recurring past. The ultimate personification of the gilded grossness of the 1980s, Donald Trump, is president of the United States. And as a consequence of his excesses—and of the boom in Fake (and Fox) News—an appreciation of powerful independent journalism is reviving. We may even be at the start of a new golden age.