by Tina Brown
Meanwhile, I feel every day the stirring to tell new stories—and a recurring sensation in my life of new beginnings: restlessness.
Tina and Tatler staff, London, 1979. Featured in these diaries: editorial enfant terrible Nicholas Coleridge (far left) next to deputy editor Georgina Howell. At back: Fashion editor Michael Roberts. Right: Cover girl punk rocker Paula Yates, 1982. Left: My husband-to-be, Sir Galahad Sunday Times editor Harry Evans, drawn by Mark Boxer.
Tina snapped outside Tatler’s second office, Covent Garden, 1981.
Literary heartthrob Martin Amis in 1980.
Tina with two of Tatler’s founding gang, Gabé Doppelt and Miles Chapman, reunited at Nicholas Coleridge’s wedding, July 1989.
Tsar of all the Russias, Alexander Liberman, editorial director of Condé Nast Publications, combined deft political skills with sublime charm (photo by Arthur Elgort).
The people who made Vanity Fair’s pages, 350 Madison Avenue, circa 1988. Front row, left to right: Jane Sarkin, features editor; Charles Churchward, design director; TB; Pamela McCarthy, managing editor. Second row: Sarah Giles, editor at large; Sarah Lewis, assistant to TB; Elisabeth Biondi, photo director; David Kuhn, senior editor; Sharon Delano, senior editor. Third row: Ann Powell, assistant managing editor; Marina Schiano, style director; Miles Chapman, senior editor; Richard Sacks, research; Elise O’Shaughnessy, political editor. (Photo by Annie Leibovitz.)
The Sun King, Condé Nast chairman S. I. Newhouse Jr, and his wife, Victoria.
TB’s first VF cover, April 1984, showed Daryl Hannah shot by Helmut Newton with story by Dominick Dunne.
Fox-trot at the White House, June 1985. The Harry Benson cover with the Reagans and the kiss that ignited media mania.
TB says good-bye to the Reagans at the White House; shot by Annie Leibovitz, 1989.
VF’s players. Top row, left to right: Michael Roberts, fashion/style director; executive editor Wayne Lawson with West Coast bureau chief, Caroline Graham; TB talking stories at the VF office with writers Dominick Dunne and Marie Brenner and art director Charles Churchward (standing). Bottom row: VF’s top gun critics James Wolcott and Stephen Schiff; design director Ruth Ansel.
Condé Nast legend Horst P. Horst (above) shot TB in classic black-and-white, 1985.
VF cartoonist Robert Risko’s more irreverent portrait.
TB’s wedding to Harold Evans, August 1981, at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton home of Washington Post editor Benjamin C. Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn. Left to right: Anthony Holden, Marie Brenner, Sunday Times reporter writer David Blundy, Sally Quinn, the bride and groom, Joan Juliet Buck, Anna Blundy, and best man Ben Bradlee.
TB joyfully pregnant, August 1985, on the deck of the Evans-Brown oceanfront house at Quogue, Long Island, seen in watercolor above.
TB’s mother, Bettina, with Georgie, age three.
TB and Harry backpacking eighteen-month-old Georgie.
Family portrait by Annie Leibovitz, 1991. Thoughtful Georgie in Bermuda, 1990.
Rock-a-bye Georgie, 1986, and Georgie with baby Izzy
TB’s parents, George and Bettina, shot by George Lange at Quogue, summer of 1988
Harry and TB at a Manhattan fundraiser, October 1985
Self-portrait of VF’s star photographer Annie Leibovitz, summer 1989.
Left from top: Some hit Annie covers: Michael Jackson; Demi Moore—the iconic baby bump that launched two decades of replicas from other pregnant stars; the cultural charisma of ballet maestro Mikhail “Misha” Baryshnikov; and classic Cher. Above: Three quintessential Annie spreads: Hall of Fame opener Michael Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, and a languid Diane Sawyer.
Vanity Fair’s fifth-anniversary bash at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe club, March 1988. Top: Saxing out with the blonde band. Bottom left: TB steps out with one of the Carmen Mirandas; Donald J. Trump zooms S. I. Newhouse Jr. Bottom middle: Tom Wolfe tells TB a secret. Right, from top: Fashion designer Patrick Kelly and TB; the night’s impresarios, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell; VF writer Bob Colacello hits the floor with LA editor Wendy Stark.
Reinaldo Herrera, VF’s man-about-town editor, the indefatigable news source on foreign strongmen, art legends, and kleptocratic dictators.
Helmut Newton’s cover and inside shots of alleged murderer Claus von Bülow in black leather and spoofing Queen Victoria, that ran with the riveting report of the trial by Dominick Dunne, evoked astonishment and outrage, August 1985.
TB and baby Izzy, two news junkies in Quogue, caught by Annie
The Princess Di cover story broke the news of royal marital discord, October 1985. Goldie Hawn, shot by Herb Ritts, was summer joy, September 1989. Right: Nightshirt editing.
The murder of zoologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda first brought naturalist writer Alex Shoumatoff (near left) to VF, September 1986. Many more compelling foreign reports followed.
Manhattan nights. Top: TB with Gayfryd Steinberg, stepmother of the bride, at the reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after the wedding of Laura Steinberg and Jonathan Tisch, April 1988. Above: TB and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour catch up at a Bergdorf Goodman fashion fundraiser by Chanel, September 1991.
Party wizard Robert Isabell collaborated with Studio 54 founder Ian Schrager to transform the bare Culver Studio’s soundstage in Culver City, California, for the Vanity Fair fundraiser for the Phoenix House rehab center, March 1990. Left to right: Bob Colacello, Ian Schrager, TB, and Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, the founder of Phoenix House.
Next act: TB as editor in chief of The New Yorker. In 1994 Karl Lagerfeld dashed off this rendition of TB as the magazine’s dandified symbol, Eustace Tilley, originated by graphic artist Rea Irvin on the first New Yorker cover in 1925.
For TB’s first cover, the artist Ed Sorel’s punk in a Central Park carriage evoked Old Guard anxiety about what the new editorial regime might bring, October 1992. Inspired by ethnic tensions between Jews and African Americans in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Art Spiegelman’s Valentine’s Day 1993 cover was conceived as a dreamlike vision of comity and love, but it sparked a furor of heated debate. Right: TB at her desk at The New Yorker, 1998.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The entries in The Vanity Fair Diaries, written in the heat of the moment, were inevitably rife with errors, names half remembered, dates scrambled, relationships confused, professions and titles bollixed up. I enlisted some invaluable reading eyes to help clean up confusions. I hope that in this editing process we caught all or most of the flubs while leaving intact the immediacy of the original text.
I am deeply grateful in this endeavor to a trio of punctilious fact police: Jolene Lescio, Cindy Quillinan, and Brenda Phipps. They also provided invaluable administrative support. My daughter, Isabel, offered essential millennial bafflement about people I assumed everyone knew, but about whom, it turns out, no one under thirty has a clue. She encouraged me to add identifications of the characters who appear throughout as they are introduced. And I am so appreciative of Miles Chapman, who brought his beady eye to catching errors and style points in late-stage galleys.
Annie Leibovitz, who figures so much in these pages, generously allowed reproduction of her pictures from Vanity Fair and of my family and me over the years; she was as passionately engaged as ever when I sought her advice on other issues. Karen Mulligan and Laura Cali from Annie’s studio were remarkable in the swiftness and care with which they found the wonderful images we featured in the book.
Stephen Schiff, Vanity Fair’s brilliant critic and contributor, was always readily available to amplify certain cultural details—and I am indebted to Gabé Doppelt for her pointed suggestions.
The glorious photographic insert section was the result of miraculous teamwork by friends, helpers, and former colleagues. First, it was a pleasure to work with Henry Holt’s remarkably talented design director, Meryl Levavi, who contributed so much creativity. I thank especially VF’s managing editor, my old friend Chris Garrett, along with Ivan Shaw, Allison Ingram, and Matthew Barad i
n Condé Nast Rights and Permissions, for speedily clearing multiple images for publications.
Tiggy Maconochie of Maconochie Photography was uncommonly helpful in securing Helmut Newton’s pictures for publication, as was Arthur Elgort’s agent, Marianne Houtenbos, when I set my heart on Arthur’s masterly portrait of Alexander Liberman, caught in full charm mode at a Manhattan night out. (Thanks, too, to André Leon Talley, for urging me to use it full page, providing the “glory” that Alex would have urged on me in the past.) Roxanne Lowit, peerless snapper of Manhattan nights, was generous with her time in the dog days of summer, printing up all the evocative snaps she took of Vanity Fair guests and contributors, supported by assiduous work from Melanie Martinez and Lucky Singh at Lucky Visuals Inc.
A big, big thanks to the photographers and artists who were so kind about the inclusion of their work—Eric Boman, Harry Benson, Kathy Amerman, Tim Graham, Mark McKenna (on behalf of the late Herb Ritts), Ed Sorel, Art Spiegelman, and The New Yorker’s art editor, Françoise Mouly, who facilitated the reproduction of two of my favorite New Yorker covers. Elisabeth Biondi, VF and TNY’s former photo director, helped me reach many photographers no longer in my rolodex. And finally, Leigh Cafferty and Elena Adams at Tina Brown Live Media were a great support in their willingness to get this onerous task completed in record time.
I thank, too, the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations) for digging out Vanity Fair’s accurate circulation numbers in its first eight years of life.
It could not be more of a pleasure to be published by Holt. The conviction and support of president and publisher Stephen Rubin has buoyed me up through the whole process, and it’s been a pleasure to experience the dynamism and cool decisiveness of editor in chief Gillian Blake. Thanks to them, I was blessed to work with the extraordinary editor Courtney Hodell, whose sophisticated judgment and punctilious attention to detail were a great gift, as was the judicious attention of copy editor Jane Elias and the all-seeing eye of managing editor Kenn Russell. Thanks also to Holt’s Rick Pracher, Maggie Richards, and Pat Eisemann for their energy and insights.
I would not have had the courage to publish the diaries at all without the encouragement, discernment, and keen judgment of my brilliant friend and former New Yorker colleague Hendrick Hertzberg.
And of course, as always, my guiding voice throughout has been the editor I turn to first and last, my husband, Harry.
This book is dedicated to my literary agent of thirty-five years, Ed Victor, who died last June after a long, difficult illness. Without his optimism, strength, and belief in me, The Vanity Fair Diaries would not exist. Thank you, dear Ed.
PS. Left to right: July 2000. After the Queen honored TB with a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for services to journalism, TB and Harry celebrate in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace. Summer 2017: Holiday snaps of Georgie and Isabel. Right: Harry turns 89 and eats the words of his latest book with a Do I Make Myself Clear? birthday cake.
ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All images in this book are courtesy of the author’s private collection with the exception of the following:
Dedication:
Ed Victor, champion and beloved friend. © Carol Ryan Victor.
Insert
Tina and Tatler staff. Photograph by Graham Morris/Evening Standard/Getty Images.
Paula Yates Tatler cover. © Norman Parkinson.
Harold Evans drawing. © Mark Boxer.
Martin Amis in 1980. © Angela Gorgas.
Tina outside Tatler’s second office. © Ken Sharp.
Alexander Liberman. © Arthur Elgort.
Staff group VF, 1992. © Annie Leibovitz.
Si Newhouse Jr. with his wife. © Roxanne Lowit.
Dominick Dunne. © Kathy Amerman.
VF cover, “Blonde Ambition.” Photograph by Helmut Newton. © The Helmut Newton Estate / Maconochie Photography.
The Harry Benson Reagan cover. © Harry Benson.
Goodbye to Reagans at White House. © Annie Liebowitz.
Kiss that ignited media mania. © Harry Benson.
Michael Roberts. © Roxanne Lowit.
Wayne Lawson with Caroline Graham. © Roxanne Lowit.
Tina talking at VF office with Dominick Dunne and Marie Brenner. © Annie Liebowitz.
James Wolcott. © Gasper Tringale.
Stephen Schiff. © Roxanne Lowit.
Ruth Ansel. © Roxanne Lowit.
Tina in classic black-and-white. © Horst P. Horst.
Condé Nast legend Horst P. Horst. © Michael Auer.
Tina portrait by VF cartoonist Robert Risko. © Robert Risko.
Family portrait, 1991. © Annie Leibovitz.
Tina’s parents, George and Bettina Brown, summer 1988. © George Lange.
Annie Leibovitz self-portrait. © Annie Leibovitz.
VF cover, Michael Jackson. © Annie Leibovitz.
VF cover, Demi Moore. © Annie Leibovitz.
Ballet maestro Mikhail (Misha) Baryshnikov. © Annie Leibovitz.
VF cover, Cher. © Annie Leibovitz.
VF spread, Michael Jackson. © Annie Leibovitz.
VF spread, Whoopi Goldberg. © Annie Leibovitz.
VF spread, Diane Sawyer. © Annie Leibovitz.
Saxing out with blonde band. © Roxanne Lowit.
Tina with one of the Carmen Mirandas. © Roxanne Lowit.
Donald J. Trump and S. I. Newhouse Jr. © Roxanne Lowit.
Tom Wolfe tells Tina a secret. © Roxanne Lowit.
Patrick Kelly and Tina. © Roxanne Lowit.
Ian Schrager with Steve Rubell. Photograph by Patrick McMullan/Contributor/Getty Images.
Bob Colacello dancing with Wendy Starke. © Roxanne Lowit.
Renaldo Herrara. © Roxanne Lowit.
VF cover, “Fatal Charm.” Photograph by Helmut Newton. © The Helmut Newton Estate / Maconochie Photography.
Claus von Bülow with bowl on head. Photograph by Helmut Newton. © The Helmut Newton Estate / Maconochie Photography.
Helmut Newton. © Roxanne Lowit.
VF spread, “Fatal Charm: The Social Web of Claus von Bülow.” Photograph by Helmut Newton. © The Helmut Newton Estate / Maconochie Photography.
Tina and baby Izzy in Quogue. © Annie Leibovitz.
VF cover, Princess Diana. © Tim Graham.
VF cover, Goldie Hawn. © Herb Ritts.
VF spread, “The Fatal Obsession of Dian Fossey.” © Alan Root.
Alexander Shoumatoff. © David Holderness.
Tina and Anna Wintour. Photographer/Artist: Ron Galella, Ltd./Getty Images.
VF fundraiser for Phoenix House drug rehab center, March 1990. Courtesy of Mitchell Rosenthall’s private album.
Bob Colacello, Ian Schrager, Tina, and Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal. Courtesy of Mitchell Rosenthall’s private album.
Tina as New Yorker dandified symbol. © Rea Irvin.
New Yorker cover, October 1992. © Ed Sorel.
New Yorker cover, February 1993. © Art Spiegelman.
Tina at New Yorker desk, 1998. © Eric Boman.
Acknowledgments
The Queen pinning the medal on Tina and Harry in Buckingham Palace courtyard, July 2000. © British Ceremonial Arts Limited.
Tina and Harry in Buckingham Palace courtyard, July 2000. © PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Aarons, Slim
Abbott, Jack Henry
ABC
Abdul, Paula
Abrams, Floyd
Adams, Cindy
Addams, Charles
Adeane, Edward
Adelson, Merv
Adjani, Isabelle
Adler, Fred
Adler, Renata
Adolphus Hotel
Ad
vertising Age
Ailes, Roger
Alaia, Azzedine
Albano, Anne Marie
Alexander VI
Alexandra, Queen
Alexandre (W. Simpson’s hairdresser)
Alfonsín, Raúl
Alfred A. Knopf
Algonquin Hotel
Aline, Countess of Romanones
Allen, Herbert
Allen, Jay Presson
Allen, Julian
Allen, Woody
Allman, T. D.
Althorp, Viscount
Altrincham, Lord
Amadeus