As a rule, somebody like Martha almost always gets screwed in these sorts of deals—the kid with heart and imagination gets squeezed by deal-makers and lawyers. But Martha paid attention. She outdetailed everybody in a detail game. She never let go. (You just know when she got the call that Sam Waksal was selling Im-Clone stock, she wasn’t going to let herself be screwed like that—her crime, if any, was a fuck-him reflex.) She gave everybody the shiv before they gave it to her. She did a deal with Time Inc. to start up Martha Stewart Living, then got her magazine back from Time because she was too tough, too hard-nosed, too tactical, for even the tough guys at Time.
In negotiations and in carriage, we are talking about a most remarkable control. Absolute discipline. On message. Within theme. Never missing a beat.
And then there’s the business itself. It’s the first postmodern media empire. The Martha business is the ultimate guerrilla-marketing strategy: using the media to promote your media. It was the mirror trick, the infinite-reflection principle. Everything you did promoted everything else you did. In an age in which media could no longer stand on its own, you had to come up with an approach that allowed you to get paid for promoting yourself (the dot-commers were always trying to be Martha, but they didn’t understand that Martha always got paid to be Martha). This endless advertisement loop is the Martha monument.
And now it was being brought down.
For the prosecutors, she was a special kind of trophy. The Feds were piggybacking on her brand. Martha’s sin (she did, after all, grab the money) was not their foremost preoccupation—rather the publicity for prosecuting Martha was what they went to bed at night and woke up in the morning thinking about. Who doubts this?
And then there was the Establishment’s disdain. Entrepreneurs, while paid great lip service and occasionally mythologized, are seldom anybody’s favorite people. They’re always in the process of sucking up to somebody while alienating somebody else (sucking up while alienating down). What’s more, they’re taking power from somebody else. It’s a zero-sum media world: If you’re the flavor of the month, somebody else isn’t. And so, after twenty years of Martha’s striving, you had a very large group of people in the media business who hated Martha’s guts. (Talk to the people at Time Inc.)
As for the rest of America, it enjoys a ritual burning.
But let’s look at this through Martha’s eyes. She saw this not, I suspect, as a horrifying, Joseph K.—type reversal of fortune but as part and parcel of the never-ending effort of the bastards to get an advantage over you. This was, of course, denial, a refusal to accept your own crookedness, and it’s no doubt what the Dennis Kozlowskis of this world thought too.
But let’s also give truth its due—it’s business, and people are out to get you.
So what do you do to stay in business?
If the overwhelming amount of your equity is built into the goodwill that attaches to the name Martha Stewart, then, by definition, by the time your trials (in the press as well as in the courts) are finished, the idea of Martha Stewart, exquisitely besmirched, would be valueless.
Prosecutors—and other media—were taking Martha’s equity in the form of anti-Martha equity. It’s black-hole stuff.
Martha in prison: That’s the picture—not just a stark one but a broadly comic one. (The laughing-at-you-not-with-you thing is very bad in the image business.)
This isn’t like, say, Steve Madden, the shoe guy, whose name is on the door and the insoles, who had recently gone off to jail for various financial shenanigans. We don’t know Steve. He’s a pure brand—he’s only incidentally a person. (Many designers, after all, continue to design clothes long after they’re dead—so why not from a jail cell?)
Martha was more in a Pete Rose bind—she’d dirtied something pure. Of course, there was a lot of willing suspension of disbelief here—we didn’t really believe that Martha or Pete or baseball was pure.
Martha may be more George Steinbrenner—like. In Steinbrenner, who pled to a felony charge in the seventies, you already had a quintessentially moneygrubbing, I-take-what-I-want sumbitch. Steinbrenner the felon is not that different from Steinbrenner the nonfelon. He could, therefore, after an appropriate time out, recommence his management of the Yankees.
Martha is, we know, also a moneygrubbing, I-take-what-I-want sumbitch. Susan Magrino, Martha’s longtime PR consigliere, should have gotten her head around this. The strategy should probably have been to jettison the old Martha image and suggest that a felony charge and conviction are a natural part of the Martha story. That being your own brand requires a nastiness and greediness and megalomania that make prosecution always a possible outcome.
The theme should have been My Way. Sinatra is of no small relevance here.
Most of Sinatra’s career was under a cloud. At several points, it seemed sure he was headed for indictment. If Johnny Roselli hadn’t ended up stuffed in an oil can, who knows what would have happened to Frank.
In part, Frank was tougher than the prosecutors. But nobody can really be tougher than the Feds.
You can be more talented, though. Frank sang his way out of trouble.
Could Martha pot or darn or sauté—I’m not sure I can quite get the parallel here—her troubles away?
The point is about talent. The Feds were trying to make Martha out to be Kozlowski—just your average business crook, ever fungible. Who will miss Kozlowski? Will the world be lesser without him? But Martha is, I believe, unique. She has vast, if eccentric, talent. For presentation, for look and feel, for brandedness, for media itself. (I’d argue that it is so hard to make a successful magazine of any sort that if you do, you deserve a type of immunity.)
Hugh Hefner could be instructive here—indeed, I saw his daughter, the iron maiden, Christie Hefner, across the room having a glass of wine.
Hef got into trouble in the eighties. It was gaming-commission stuff. His empire teetered. He lost the Playboy Clubs—the empire’s jewel.
Hef was as identified with Playboy as Martha was with Martha.
In many ways, Hef and the Playboy concept are the real precursors to Martha—not only live the lifestyle, but Omnimedia-ize the lifestyle. Playboy, too, like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, in a moment of hubris, became a public company. This was an error—the greed factor, which is why, of course, Martha was in her present mess. Having a public company means that the world is going to be judging the monetary value of your identity instead of the quality of your talent.
What was necessary for Hef and Playboy—and what may now be necessary for Martha and her enterprises—was a period of debranding. (This may be a larger trend in an overbranded world—even AOL Time Warner was considering getting rid of the AOL.)
Playboy became a kind of generic concept of airbrushed girls rather than a heroic concept of a new lifestyle. Likewise, Martha would have to turn into a well-executed upper-middle-class design-accessory company rather than the incredible story of Martha herself.
Come to think of it, Martha, like Hef, should probably put her daughter in charge of the company. The deal she should really have tried for while she still had bargaining room was house arrest—not unlike Hef in the Los Angeles mansion.
Whatever happens she’ll still be Martha—who paid the price for icon hood.
I scanned the room—everybody was looking for her—but no Martha anywhere.
19
TINA
But I saw Tina Brown. In fact, in her hapless manner—when she’s on her own, without minders, which she has been more and more since her magazine, Talk, closed, she tends to be hapless—she had wandered into the less-than-elite-of-the-elite reception and had to be retrieved and brought back to this special room.
Many people who have taken personal satisfaction in the fall of Tina Brown, trade in hapless-Tina stories. Mine was once to have, one morning, picked up a newspaper in the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel, and, on my way out, run into a woman in an outsize raincoat, with a refugee-like scarf around her head, weaving towa
rd me. She seemed confused, or in some distress, or so nearsighted as to make you think immediately of Mr. Magoo. She reached out to steady herself on me and, in an English accent, which made her seem somehow even more befuddled, asked, “Do you know the way to Madison Avenue?”
“You’re actually on Madison Avenue,” I replied, looking at her closely and realizing, suddenly, that the discombobulated woman was Tina Brown.
This story, which I’ve long dined out on, and which everyone I’ve told has enjoyed enormously, is an example of backlash. You could not have told this story a few years ago. People would not have been receptive to it. It would have said more about the teller (that you were envious of, or worse, unknown to Tina). Or it would have been understood in a different way. It might have even seemed charming, humanizing (at the height of her power, people often spoke of her vulnerability).
Whereas, at this moment, everyone understood it as caricature. Belittling. Farcical. Possibly exaggerated (was she really weaving? Really wearing a scarf like that?). It fit the current thinking: Tina Brown was a lost figure who could no longer even find her way to the main thoroughfare of her life and career.
Tina, even more than Martha, may be the most vivid exponent of the media life to have been brought down—in some sense she may stand in for all of the others who the crowd secretly, and not so secretly, wishes to see toppled.
Indeed, the failure of Talk, launched in 2000 and dead two years later, was the most talked about thing about it.
Why did the shuttering of a magazine that never had much of a following, that couldn’t ever define itself, that wasn’t particularly talked about, and that by some substantial consensus was expected to fail, attract so much interest?
What an anticlimax.
You could fairly say that Talk magazine had been destined to close ever since its second issue was published. But I think the slow-motion, you-saw-it-coming-from-a-mile-away sense, with everyone playing a part in the debacle, with the operatic levels of denial and umbrage and soldiering-on, and then the inevitable shuttering anyway, were all part of the attraction.
While Talk never managed in its pages to summon the Zeitgeist, or find the tone of the time, or create the heat that its editor, Tina Brown, was famous for creating at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, it did manage to mirror the real thing that was happening in the culture, which was that every big-deal thing was failing. Indeed, Talk was launched just as all of the boom-time expectations that had been raised—the new economy, the new media, the new earnings multiples—began to crumble.
Talk became the perfect expression of these dashed expectations. The magazine, which envisioned itself as a great new vehicle of promotion and mythmaking, became the embodiment of hype deflation. On the subject of failure and unrealizable expectations and the undoing of invincibility and celebrity, it was something like performance art.
Talk failed publicly and unself-consciously (it was not aware enough of what it was doing to be self-conscious), and also instructively: It was a detailed primer on how not to publish a magazine.
True, it worked overtime to create the illusion of success. But unlike, say, Enron, which snookered the stock market and the media (not to mention the President), Talk’s illusion seemed to work mostly on the people working at Talk(although Talk seemed to have snookered the Clintons—Chelsea even became one of Talk’s name writers). Talk got the trickery backward. Talk w orked its magic on the wrong people. It fooled itself.
For the rest of the interested world, it was an absolutely transparent enterprise. There was the thickness of the first issues and the thinness of ensuing numbers; there was the constant and well-documented turnover of the staff (writers and editors were always rolling their eyes about their Talk experience); there were the article miscues (a steady stream of over-the-hill or irrelevant actors and actresses on the cover); there were the damning newsstand sales (it was widely reported that Talk was selling only 20 percent of its newsstand distribution); there was the sniping from Hearst, a partner with Miramax in the Talk venture; indeed, there were the disparaging remarks from Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein himself (likewise, the Talk people disparaged Harvey).
And yet, at the same time, there was the apparent belief at Talk that this was normal. Tina was always going on about what it takes to get it right. Great magazines require great suffering, she seemed to be saying. She appeared to have convinced herself that Talk’s dysfunction, and, for that matter, her own dysfunction, were somehow the building blocks of success.
In fact, it was not hard to see that one of the key problems of Talk was Tina herself. In a logical enterprise and a rational universe, she would have been fired. Except that she was the only reason for the magazine’s existence. Who would have wanted the magazine without her? She was the value proposition. All the goodwill was bound up in her. She was the asset—and she was rapidly depreciating.
There was, vividly, over Talk’s two-and-a-half-year life, the transformation of Tina Brown from princess of the media-celebrity-market-power culture to one of its dispossessed. (At the same time, her husband, Harry Evans, the former editor of the Times of London and one of the most famous journalists of the era, was also sliding down the power ladder.) There was even a visual morph, from sexy, glam, high-style power babe to dowdy, bad-hair, no-style lady (she who had raised superficiality to perhaps its highest expression was suddenly complaining that she was the victim of sexist stereotyping). She began openly, albeit awkwardly, to express her hurt and anger. It was all downward spiral.
She seemed to become something other than the real Tina. She was a hoax. Or, cruelly (she is right that people were cruel to her), she started to seem like a nuthouse version of Tina Brown. She was someone claiming to be Tina—with the other patients and a kindly hospital staff humoring her.
There was a lot of pretend (and bizarre) behavior.
The Talk party to celebrate the Golden Globe awards, held the night before she and publisher Ron Galotti told the staff the magazine was closing, was either grand denial, financial irresponsibility (they should have been retrenching months ago—kill the parties!), or pathetic pretense: We must put on a good face for the stars.
Over the course of Talk’s two years, beginning with her famous Statue of Liberty bash, there were always the parties. Tina as media hostess. Tina as celebrity arbiter. Tina as she was when she had all that Condé Nast money and power behind her. It was Tina pretending to be who she no longer was.
Strangely, trying to imitate successful business magazines that hold conferences where attendees pay thousands of dollars, she inaugurated a series of Talk conferences called “Innovators and Navigators.” She invited celebrities and opinion-makers and anyone who was anybody—but, neglecting the key element, and no doubt fearing she’d be stood up, she didn’t make anybody pay. It was, in other words, just a costly illusion. You have a conference but not a conference business.
There was, finally, no value to Tina’s ability to attract celebrities (although the Talk staff would desperately argue that this was of great value to Miramax—that the publicity itself was worth it, that Talk was a legitimate marketing expense for Miramax and its movies).
Tina has always had a reality-distortion field around her. Things became larger around her, more interesting, more important. But in the end, she was standing alone in that distortion field.
She was, by the end, more interesting for how she came to be—and what that said about everybody else and how they tried to be like Tina and how they were willing to treat her royally—than for what she was.
There was even a dreadful book about Tina and Harry—Tina and Harry Come to America, by Judy Backrach—which briefly was the talk of the town.
The book, which details the couple’s professional, social, and sexual histories (here is a universal lesson: Whoever you sleep with will someday talk about it—plan accordingly), was itself part and parcel of the backlash—an unrelenting, not-very-nuanced indictment of character flaws, professional conflicts and
compromises, and a host of other unkind social acts written for an eager, and bitterly predisposed, audience.
Still, as compelling as all these tidbits are, the more telling point about the book was that there is no smoking gun. There’s no deed, or event, or betrayal, that provides a clear explanation for why the crowd would want to tear Tina and Harry apart—why they should have become such a cautionary tale. Indeed, they really have not behaved differently from most other hyperdedicated media careerists in Manhattan.
In fact, what the book outlines is a Horatio Alger story of get-up-and-go, shoulder-to-the-wheel, how-to-do-what-you’ve-got-to-do-to-get-ahead-in-the-media-business savvy. I’d recommend it to anyone who is starting out. It’s a fine manual.
Rule No. 1: Don’t sleep with just anyone; make your couplings count (Tina’s college-age liaisons included Dudley Moore, Auberon Waugh, and Martin Amis, and culminated at the age of 21 with Harry Evans, a national monument in British journalism).
Rule No. 2: Learn how to give a party (which is different from learning how to party).
Rule No. 3: Cultivate the press (publicity being the currency of our time)—best done by throwing parties.
Rule No. 4: Get to know some celebrities (which takes work, but it’s easier than you think) and invite them to your parties.
There is the strong suggestion in the book, and on the part of the many people I know who obsessively rehash Tina’s and Harry’s careers, that there is something shallow, vulgar, and possibly immoral about their way of career building. And yet there is virtually nobody who is a success in the media business (Tina and I are the same age, and I found myself, as I read Tina and Harry Come to America, awed by her precocity—with just a little more energy and fortitude, I could have, I think now, learned how to throw a party) who hasn’t followed some of these precepts. Tina (and it is always Tina, more so than Harry) is in a terrible trap: We are enamored of her because she was such a success; we are repelled by her because of what it took to be a success. (There’s surely a woman’s point to be made here—a man is respected for his wiles, a woman trashed for hers.)
Autumn of the Moguls Page 26