Gossip
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Buzz of course also assumes lots of gossip, for if buzz is the destination, gossip is usually the mode of getting there. "Insiderly," a word of Tina Brown's devising, was the quality that she was after. To know the kind of clothes significant people wear and the houses and apartments they live in and what they pay for them; to understand their psychological motivations, their romantic interests, their social calendars; to know these things, and anything else of gossipy interest about them, yet somehow not feel demeaned by one's own low curiosity—this is the trick of producing buzz.
Buzz-producing people were almost invariably celebrities, who captured the interest of the moment through their money or connections or outlandish behavior or social antecedents, or simply by their talent for attracting publicity: Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos, Donald Trump, Madonna, Cher, Kennedy widows and children, movie directors and stars, people known less for durable achievement than for embodying the spirit of the time, the Zeitgeist. Capturing the Zeitgeist has always been the name of Tina's desire. Madonna is perhaps a perfect example, a woman endlessly changing herself to suit the style of the moment; in fact, Tina Brown herself has been called the Madonna of contemporary journalism.
The present is the only tense Tina Brown seems ever to have known or cared to live in. What's going on, what's going down, what's happening, what buzzin'—now! Occasional pieces would appear in Vanity Fair about Haiti or Russia or on serious artists, but the role of these was little more than that of the Bible in the whorehouse; they weren't what brought people to the magazine. As befits a magazine devoted to the now, nothing published in it endured, nor was meant to. The only journalist whose career Tina Brown can have been said to have made is that of the photographer Annie Leibovitz. ("Annie is a Zeitgeist creature herself," Tina said.) Dominick Dunne was another Vanity Fair mainstay; he reported on the murder trials of the rich and famous, with plenty of room left over for name-dropping and gossip. ("The reason I'm good on assholes," Dunne averred, "is that I was once an asshole myself.")
Vanity Fair was a magazine devoted to a fantasy of the highlife. The highlife, as Tina Brown understood it, was royalty, clothing designers, movie stars, the wildly wealthy. What was on offer for readers was the illusion that one was getting a privileged peek into how these people really lived. The editor hired what today we would call networkers to sidle up to and seduce the magazine's subjects and let them expose themselves to the Vanity Fair treatment: elaborate photo sessions, admiring prose, hyped-up profiles, all in exchange for tidbits of gossip and an insiderly view of their lives.
If one had to select a single sentence to stand for all Tina's years as editor of Vanity Fair, it would be one from her own article "The Mouse That Roared," about the young Princess Diana, who was just then engaging the frivolous world's attention in a powerful way; the sentence, the article's concluding one, reads: "The debonair Prince [Charles] is pussy-whipped from here to eternity." At the sentence's final cadence one can hear the bells of Westminster Abbey gong to mark the demise of a once great country, done in by gossipy journalism.
Under Tina Brown the circulation of Vanity Fair continued to rise, at one point reaching more than a million readers, and in 1991 it even showed a profit. Clearly it was, as they say in the trade, the "hot book" of its day. But over the years of Tina's tenure it is estimated that Vanity Fair lost roughly $63 million. The reason the magazine lost so much money was because of its editor's impressive extravagance. She paid the highest salaries to steal editors from other publications; the fees she paid writers were much greater than any other magazine paid, and not infrequently she scrapped the articles they produced, doubtless for their being of insufficient sizzle. Under her editorship, the magazine had a strong publicity arm, and was known for the Gatsby-like hollow grandeur of its parties. As an editor, Tina was not about making money, not about producing literature, but about attracting attention.
Her skill in doing so clearly impressed Si Newhouse, for not long after acquiring The New Yorker he decided to make Tina Brown its editor. (He also installed her husband as president and editor in chief of Random House, the publishing firm.) One thing to turn a fledgling—also failing—magazine like Vanity Fair over to a brash journalist without any conviction apart from the importance of being up to the moment; quite another to turn over to her The New Yorker, that holy of holies, easily the most sacrosanct publication in twentieth-century America.
Whereas The New Yorker before Tina Brown was loved, while she was its editor it was talked about. Buzz, buzz, buzz. To be sure, it had been talked about before, but in a different way, having published controversial essays by Rachel Carson on pollution, Hannah Arendt on the victims of the Holocaust, and James Baldwin on the Black Muslims. But buzz, as Tina understood it, was never part of the deal on West Forty-third Street, where the magazine had had its offices for decades. Instead of buzz, the old New Yorker, some thought, specialized only in zzzz, running excruciatingly lengthy articles on wheat, geological faults, and other distinctly unbuzzy subjects. New Yorker writers were coddled, allowed to take years to turn in articles; under William Shawn's editorship, the magazine's writer on baseball, Roger Angell, would sometimes turn in his piece on the World Series in February. Sometimes it seemed as if the magazine was making a determined—and actually quite successful—effort not to be up to the moment.
Tina Brown eliminated criticism and short stories from Vanity Fair, and was apparently not keen to have them in The New Yorker, though these items were at the heart of the magazine's appeal. When she became its editor, she announced that "seriousness will be sexy again. Substance is back in style." The reaction was furious. Garrison Keillor viewed Tina Brown's ascension to the editorship of The New Yorker by noting: "If some ditzy American editor went to London, took over the Spectator, and turned it into, say, In Your Face: A Magazine of Mucus, there would be a big uproar. Here, a great American magazine falls into the clutches of a British editor who seems to know this country mainly from television and movies and nobody says much about it."
Keillor was one of the New Yorker contributors who resigned upon Tina Brown's hiring. Tina let go of some seventy-odd other writers and editors, many of whom had longtime relationships with the magazine. The tendency was to cut away—how to say it?—the less buzzy; among them were John McPhee, the excellent science writer Jeremy Bernstein, and the earnest Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew. From Vanity Fair she brought over writers who knew how to deliver the kind of goods she wanted. Assuming readers had as short an attention span as she—"boring" was her ultimate putdown for writing that in her view did not come off—Tina cut the length of New Yorker articles, allowed the deliberately outré into its pages, and emphasized the lively over the thoughtful.
Some felt that Tina Brown saved The New Yorker, which was said to be on the slide into gradual decline. She certainly did what she could to shock the magazine's old-line readers. She published covers meant to outrage, such as the one in which a Hasid is kissing a black woman. She turned one issue over to the foulmouthed comedienne Roseanne Barr, an experiment that flopped. She opened the gates to rougher language and more sex-ridden stories. Daphne Merkin, a writer with a penchant for unnecessary confession, published an article on the pleasure that being spanked by men gave her. With her emphasis on Hollywood, the magazine began to feel, some thought, as if it were being edited in Los Angeles.
Tina received some praise and much criticism for her efforts as editor of The New Yorker. But she achieved her main object, which was to cause a stir, to be talked about. In the course of all the stir, more of Si Newhouse's money went down the tubes, vast sums of it, to pay for articles never published, issues torn up and remade at the last possible moment, galas whose motive was further networking in Washington and Hollywood. Celebrity journalism, as Tina practiced it, did not come cheap.
Out of boredom, or bubbling-over ambition, or perhaps sensing that she had gone as far as she could on Si Newhouse's money, in 1998 Tina Brown departed The New Yorker to begin a new ma
gazine. Called Talk, which is how most gossip begins, it had the backing of Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, the movie studio. This time out, Tina would be creating something entirely her own, not building upon or resuscitating the work of precursors. Relying on roughly the same formula—that of gossip about the rich and famous—the plan was to make Talk sexy, racy, buzzy, and more insiderly than Napoleon's duodenum.
Talk never came off. Part of the problem may have been the reader, whom Tina imagined as "a woman in her thirties who wears Prada, watches Miramax movies, and uses Urbanfetch to order a Harry Potter book"—in other words, a woman who sounds a lot like Tina Brown. Part of the problem was staffing, getting the right editors and writers to fulfill her fantasy of a hot magazine. Moreover, the connection with Miramax was supposed to result in lots of pieces in Talk being used as fodder for Miramax movies. Didn't, as they say, happen.
Celebrity journalism is not usually directly deflationary or iconoclastic, but Talk was to have a strong touch of this to give it kick. A young editor at the magazine called one day to tell me that a department on reputations was planned, and Tina would love it if I were to take down some overrated figure in American life. I suggested Arthur Miller. "He's a terrible writer and even less impressive as a guru or a political saint," I said. The young editor thought it a swell idea, and said he would get back to me after he had run it by Tina. The next day he called to say that an Arthur Miller piece didn't feel quite right to Tina, but did I have any other ideas. "How about Walter Cronkite," I said, "a man with a face only a nation could love, and a genuinely unintelligent man, though the confident cadences of his broadcaster's fluency served to camouflage this over a long and hugely successful career." Great idea, the young editor said. The next day he called to say that Walter Cronkite didn't seem quite right to Tina, either.
Although she may have judged such subjects less than buzzy, my reading of these decisions was that Tina Brown thought these men too important to attack, whatever stir it might have caused. She was in fact only half an iconoclast, the other half a woman still on the way up and still in need of the aid of important people to get to higher places. We finally settled, the young editor, Tina Brown, and I, on the pompous literary critic Harold Bloom. I wrote the article, it was accepted and paid for ($5,000), but it never ran because Talk went out of business soon after I completed it.
The many people whose enmity Tina Brown earned were pleased at her failure with Talk. They bruited it about that the main reason for the flop was that Tina had lost whatever magic she had in reading her old friend the Zeitgeist, that she was now herself out of all the important loops, and no longer a player, a contender for the kind of buzzy attention she was so expert at creating. Hillary Clinton, whom Tina supposedly admired, once remarked that "Tina is the junk food of journalism."
If Tina Brown may not truly be the lovable, huggable Miss Brown, she is surely, to cite not a song but a full musical, the Unsinkable Tina Brown. In 2003, a year after the collapse of Talk, she began a less than successful talk show on cable television, which lasted two years. She wrote a book on the poor dead airhead Princess Diana, filled with gossipy anecdotes.
As some women are good at finding husbands, Tina Brown has always been good at finding backers. Before long, with the financial support of Barry Diller, the movie and media man, she began the Daily Beast, a website known in the business as a news aggregator; she took stories from other newspapers and magazines and television stations, copied videos from talk and interview shows and YouTube, and hired a small staff of writers with a nose for gossip and controversy to contribute other items on subjects she thought hot or amusing. "I want this to be a speedy read that captures the Zeitgeist," she said. "We'll be smart and opinionated, looking to help cut through the volume [of news and information] with a keen sensibility. We're aiming for a curious, upscale and global audience who love politics, news and the media world."
The Daily Beast is Tina Brown's attempt to become the Mme. Récamier of the Twitter age. The website offers, she says, "a guided sensibility, with attitude." It's a site "that's really about tapping into the Zeitgeist"; it is "to move where the Zeitgeist is." As for its politics, it is to be "polypartisan," which means that it will attempt to be outside party politics: not disinterested, necessarily, but chiefly interested in the stories that best allow for insiderliness: the scandals, the defeats, just about anything, in other words, that can be personalized. "My bias is," Tina said, "is it interesting, is it provocative, is it amusing ... does it go against received wisdom."
She clearly hopes that the Daily Beast will at last be the white ass upon which she will ride into Jerusalem. It's possible. But there are many competitors floating out there in cyberspace: the Huffington Post, the Atlantic Wire, and many more. Still, with her bounteous energy, as she approaches sixty, she's not a woman to be counted out.
She demonstrated that yet again when, toward the end of 2010, she helped engineer a partnership between the Daily Beast and the all but defunct Newsweek, which had been bought for its debt by a ninety-two-year-old audio manufacturer named Sidney Harman. "It means that the Daily Beast's animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary weekly print magazine in a joint venture, named The Newsweek Daily Beast Company," Tina announced in the Daily Beast. "As for me, I shall now be in the editor-in-chief's chair at both the Daily Beast and Newsweek." Call her indefatigable, call her undefeatable, with her energy for hype, her robust false enthusiasm for the nonexistent (Newsweek "legendary"?), her really quite charming ability to pump up sugar daddies and exaggerate possibilities, Tina Brown, like her or not, is a phenomenon unto herself.
"We are living," she has said, "in an age where everyone wants to know everything about you." Her great skill has been to encourage a fundamental unseriousness in her readers. The serious after all requires thoughtful effort, even some brooding on subjects; on occasion it forces one to take painful, usually moral positions; and sometimes, yes, it can be quite boring. Tina Brown peddles entertainment, which is not against the law, but ought to be recognized for what it is: distraction. Master at psyching out the Zeitgeist, she has become very much part of that same Zeitgeist, the purest type we have of the contemporary journalist, a woman whose goal, though she may not know it, is the excruciatingly boring state where everything is merely interesting and nothing finally is important.
Diary
She adored his writing, absolutely worshiped it. So when he was to give a reading at her university, she was the first to show up at the auditorium where he was to appear. She was standing in the back of the room when he approached her.
"Excuse me," he said in his greenhorn's English, "are you here for the reading?"
"I am," she said. "You're Mr. Singer, aren't you? I can't tell you how much I admire your writing. You are the only author today whose work will be read a hundred years from now. I am so honored to meet you."
"Thank you," he said. "But tell me, are you Jewish?"
"I am," she said.
"And where, if I may ask, is your family from in Europe?"
"Bialystok," she said, "on both my parents' sides."
"Oh," he said, "I know a great deal about Bialystok. Maybe we might meet after the reading and you can tell me what you know about your family's history in that fascinating city."
"That would be very nice," she said.
He was completely charming at his reading, for which the auditorium was filled. And he was even more so during the question-and-answer session. Someone asked him if he believed in free will. "Of course I believe in free will," he replied. "What choice have I?"
She went to the reception after the reading, where, after forty or so minutes, he disengaged himself from his admirers and came up to her.
"If you'd like to tell me what you know about your family's history in the city of Bialystok, I have some rooms in this building. We could do it now."
She followed him to the small apartment the university provided him: a sitting room with a couch, two chairs, a
round table with a bowl of fruit on it, and a bedroom behind a closed door.
She sat on one end of the couch, he at the other end. He was small and hairless—did he suffer from alopecia? she wondered—but with the coloring of a former redhead. He was wearing a shirt with small green polka dots and a black knit tie with a thick knot.
"So, nu, tell me what you know about Bialystok."
She began to rattle off the few facts in her possession, and hadn't got more than three minutes into it when he made his move.
"Excuse me," he said, leaning slightly forward. "May I kiss you?"
Good God, she thought, how naïve she was to let herself get into this situation. She recalled how sexy so many of his stories and novels are. Such realistic descriptions didn't come from nowhere. But the thought of being in bed with this man, who was at least thirty years older than she, and who reminded her of no one so much as her grandfather, was, beyond chilling, unthinkable.
"Oh, Mr. Singer," she said, "I am honored, please believe me, but I have to tell you that I have only recently begun my second marriage, and I don't really—"
He put up his hand, signaling her to cease all further explanations.
"No, no, no," he said with a smile. "Don't worry. Here"— he pointed to the bowl on the table—"take some fruit to your husband."
She got up from the couch, went over to the bowl, and picked out an immense Delicious apple and a green banana. When she looked back toward the couch, he was gone.
18. Too Much Even of Kreplach
I never repeat gossip, so listen carefully.
—LIZ SMITH
ALL RELIGIONS CLAIM to abhor gossip, but Judaism, to my knowledge, is the only religion to have codified its abhorrence. Lashon hara, or evil tongue, is a high-ranking Jewish sin about which a great deal has been written. A book, Chafetz Chaim (Seeker of Life), by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, is devoted entirely to guiding the reader on correct speech and the avoidance of slander. The subject is one that brings out all that is best, and worst, in the Talmudic mind, a mind that, capable of astonishing feats of memory and intellectual penetration, can sometimes also exult in the finest of hairsplitting.