Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  The photo graced the June 1985 cover. Nancy Reagan nixed the original photos. She thought the retouching had gone too far. “She wanted some of her wrinkles back,” said a Vanity Fair insider. Inside, Buckley defended Nancy’s much-ridiculed Ronniegaze: “Affection, pride, uninhibited devotion, and just the redeemingly provocative touch of ginger (or I think I see it) of the kind that says, If you don’t see what I see in him, you are blind.”

  Much of the rest of the issue was devoted to the ladys-who-lunch crowd that Brown had discovered was the key to entering New York’s power elite. “I realized one day that New York is a matriarchal society and the way to crack it is to win over a crucial circle of power women,” Brown said. “I noted names like Brooke Astor, Pat Buckley, Nan Kempner, Jane Herman, and Annette Reed, and I went to any event which had those names on the invitation.” The June 1985 issue included an article “The Women You Want to Sit Next To”—a roundup of the powerful women Brown was wooing: Susan Gutfreund, Donna Karan, Pat New-comb, Diane Sawyer. It was illustrated with a picture of Liz Smith, in a white tuxedo, tap dancing. Nation writer Alexander Cockburn called it “one of the most repulsive objects I have ever seen—all the more distasteful because it represents the cynical calculation of Vanity Fair’s young English editor Tina Brown, about what would appeal to the Mortimer’s crowd, a 32-gallon bin of international white trash, whose approval she appears to crave.” It was, Brown later said, the issue that saved her.

  By the end of that year, Brown had clarified the formula for the magazine’s success. Vanity Fair celebrated the rich, the famous, the powerful; it attacked the indicted, the fallen, the out-of-power. Those tactics were the very ones Brown had used to promote her own career—even before she came to the United States. “Perhaps because she was so keen to be famous, she was careful never to step out of line,” said former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams. “Her more wicked, mocking tone was reserved for the unimportant or those on their way down.”

  Indeed, when courting the powerful, she could sound unabashedly sycophantic, as she did in her infamous 1988 letter to CAA head Mike Ovitz, in which Brown tried to persuade the reclusive agent to sit for an interview. “Dear Mike,” she wrote, “I was surprised to hear from a friend who works there that you are on the point of breaking your silence to the press in Premiere.* I felt sure this could not be true since it would be rather like Marlon Brando choosing ‘Falcon Crest’ as a vehicle for a comeback.” Brown then went on to explain how well Ovitz would be treated by Vanity Fair. “As I see it, the world has a very limited and unsophisticated grasp of what an ‘agent’ does, particularly when that agent is you. Right now, the most hackneyed prevailing perception of you is a ‘packager,’ a term which has a connotation of crassness that has little to do with what you actually achieve on a daily basis. It seems to me that a better term for your role in the life of Hollywood would be a catalyst: activating creativity by a gifted sense of talent, material, timing and taste, plus, of course, extraordinary business acumen.” Brown offered to assign a writer, Jesse Kornbluth, who was “knowledgeably well disposed toward CAA”—who was also actively involved in screenwriting at the time. Ovitz turned down the offer for a profile, but consulted with Brown regularly, suggesting profile subjects and, in an unspoken quid pro quo, arranging for his movie star clients to attend Vanity Fair parties.

  In addition to wooing the key figures who controlled entrée into social and power circles, Brown shamelessly pandered to advertisers. Vanity Fair’s adoring articles on Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein were most obvious: Of Calvin and Kelly Klein, Andre Leon Talley wrote that “you can almost hear the click of their exact fit.” The cover story on Ralph Lauren, shot by his own photographer Bruce Weber, noted of the diminutive former Ralph Lipschitz: “Ralph Lauren, in fact, seems to be the archetypal outdoorsman: He could pass for a cowboy, pilot, wilderness outfitter or lumberjack.” Vanity Fair also ran puff pieces on Giorgio Armani, Bill Blass, Donna Karan, Kenneth Cole, Valentino, and Karl Lagerfeld.

  “Those were stories that deserved to be done,” Brown declared, insisting that the Ralph Lauren story was “very hard for us to get.” She brushed off criticisms as “sexist” saying that she would never be attacked for such things if she were a man. “The Calvin Klein thing was fluff,” she said dismissively. “It was fun.”

  “It was so obvious, really, I don’t think it compromised anyone,” a supporter defended. “She really had to do things like that to keep the magazine alive.”

  It certainly worked. In 1985, Vanity Fair had 431 ad pages—up from 335 in 1984—but it still lost $7 million. By 1987, the magazine carried about 700 ad pages, but, according to Si Newhouse’s calculations, it needed 1,000 pages to break even. In 1989, the year after the notorious Ralph Lauren cover story, it had 1,487 ad pages—one of the most amazing growth spurts in magazine history. After the Calvin Klein article, the designer took out an extraordinary 116-page advertising supplement. Vanity Fair became the undisputed industry leader and other magazines scrambled to compete; exposés of the rich and powerful were replaced with articles celebrating them.

  The pages and masthead of Vanity Fair were filled with names of Brown’s allies—or people she hoped to turn into allies. Brown hired Angela Janklow, the daughter of the well-connected literary agent Mort Janklow, as a Los Angeles correspondent, even though she had little journalism experience. Brown felt that such compromises were necessary for survival. “As you live here longer, you start to see the apparent freedom and the apparently limitless scope of it all is in fact something of an illusion because it’s all so money-driven, so commercial,” she complained. “There is that awful commercial fact that you can’t make fun of Calvin Klein, Donald Trump, and Tiffany.”

  Brown had, in fact, once assigned a story on Trump Tower, alleging that the construction was so shoddy that the doorknobs kept falling off. Before it got into print, Trump called his friend Condé Nast president Steve Florio and the piece was killed. “When it comes to being really made fun of, I don’t think Americans take kindly to it, largely because the whole Americana dream is about making it and getting respect for having done it,” she told a British reporter. “They don’t see why someone would come along and mock them. I mean ‘I’m Donald Trump and I am not here to be laughed at.’ But he should be laughed at, really.”*

  And indeed, at dinner parties in England, Brown would regale friends with tales of those funny rich Americans. “There’s this hilarious new tycoon who has just bought a cosmetics company, and at dinner the other night his wife started to get delusions of grandeur,” Brown recounted. “She turned to the hostess and said, ‘Ron’s ready to eat now.’ It broke me up!”†

  Even Brown’s boss wasn’t safe from her stinging sarcasm. “It’s why faceless millionaires buy publications,” she once said. “So they can ring up Norman Mailer and ask him to dinner”—almost certainly a reference to Newhouse, who for years pursued the writer and considered signing Mailer as a contributor to be one of his great triumphs.

  “Before I lived in America, I didn’t believe women existed like you have on Dynasty, women with coifed hair and manicured nails who run steel-pipe companies,” Brown said. “Then I met these women in New York.” She became one herself: beautiful, powerful, ruthless, with an intimidating array of connections and no qualms about using them. Brown’s and Evans’s two children had between them nearly a dozen influential godparents, including Mort Zuckerman, literary agent Ed Victor, former Daily News publisher Jim Hoge, Marie Brenner, and then-hot Conde Nast editor Gabbe Dopelt. With such allies, few dared cross her. “I have a long shadow,” she warned, “and it’s going to get longer every month.” Indeed, when her brother, movie producer Christopher Hambley Brown, pled guilty in 1988 to sexually assaulting three women on separate occasions on trains in London, no gossip columnist in America touched the story while Brown was at Condé Nast.

  Brown’s mornings began when she was picked up before dawn by her chauffeur from her Central Park South apartment. Her f
irst stop was her hairdresser, who gave her a quick comb through, and soon she was in her office sitting behind a white desk shaped like a single quotation mark. Nearby was a paper shredder. Brown had the walls painted in a peach tone to remind her, she said, of the South of France. She would bring home shopping bags full of manuscripts every evening and she and Harry—who was hired by Newhouse to edit Condé Nast’s Traveler—would read and edit them until the wee hours of the morning. The couple found a pretext to fly back to London—invariably on the Concorde—almost once a month. “You know, Tina invented a country that we called Trans-Atlantica,” Evans once said. “It had all the virtues and none of the vices of England or America. Ideally, that’s what we would like—to live in England and work in New York.” Evans seemed unaware that he was precariously close to describing a character lampooned in Tom Wolfe’s 1966 short story, “The Mid-Atlantic Man,” which describes a London adman in New York who, lording his cultural superiority over the loud, childish Americans, while greedily feasting on the abundance of American wealth, thinks he has the best of both worlds, only to realize eventually he really has neither.

  Although Brown professed to love America, with its openness and vigor, privately she was still scornful of it. She worried that her son, George Frederick, would grow up too American. “I would like him to have an English accent,” she confided to a fellow Brit. “I hate whining American children.” Once, when one of Brown’s staff brought a baby into the office, Brown screamed. “Get that goddam child out of here!” Some thought Brown’s reaction was peculiar for someone who, herself, had recently become a mother. “I adore being with George, but I don’t believe in bringing him into the office life,” Brown said. “Nor would I whip out a tit and feed him in the middle of the Four Seasons. It’s not my style.”

  Although Brown could be warm, charming, and funny when necessary, it was often by design. When she worked the crowd at parties, she was accompanied by an assistant who wore an earpiece that was hooked up to an office; the assistant, relaying information from the office, would whisper in Brown’s ear the names and bios of the people in the crowd with whom she should be friendly. People whose names weren’t likely to be boldfaced in gossip columns sometimes complained that she could also be terribly chilly. “Oh, do get out of here,” she reportedly once snapped at a member of her staff. “I want somebody with taste and class to talk to.” “You’ve shaken hands with her,” one editor said, “so you know what that limp, cold hand is like. And you certainly know about the eyes fixed pointedly over your shoulder in search of someone more to her taste, someone who will rescue her from the complete and utter tedium of you.”

  “She’s not the kind to walk into the office saying, ‘Good morning, good morning, good morning,’ ” said editor-at-large, Sarah Giles, one of several staffers Brown imported from England and who became involved in an ill-fated romance with Tina and Harry’s friend, Mort Zuckerman. “For one thing, she’s too focused. She’s always planning the next month’s issue. She’s saying to herself, ‘Right, I’ve got my sex scandal, I’ve got my murder mystery, I’ve got my celebrity profile. Now what else do I need to round it all out?’ And then on the other hand, she doesn’t say good morning to anyone because she doesn’t know who they are.”

  By the early 1990s, Tina Brown had not only succeeded in “seducing” the American media, she had also redefined its yardstick of success, popularizing the notion that a magazine should be measured by the amount of “buzz” or media attention that it generated. Brown knew how deeply Newhouse cared about his public image. “Buzz means you’re hot,” she would say, clipping articles about Vanity Fair, sending them to Newhouse with little notes attached: “Are we hot or what?” Ad pages were flat at about 1,400, and the magazine was said to be breaking even or just barely turning a profit. Newhouse had reportedly sunk somewhere between $75 and $100 million into it. Although many other Newhouse publications earned much more money than Vanity Fair, Si Newhouse responded by publicly declaring Brown “the best editor in the world.”

  Yet Brown seemed discontented with her astonishing success. Like many ambitious people, once Brown had what she fought so hard to get, she no longer found it worth having. She began to express disdain for the stars whose access she had gone to such lengths to acquire. The culture of celebrity she had helped create in the eighties now seemed to bore and even disgust her. “I don’t like Madonna particularly,” she said of the woman who graced Vanity Fair’s cover more than any other celebrity in Brown’s tenure. “She was just something to sell magazines.” Brown felt the same way about most of her other cover subjects, “I have no desire to meet Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner,” she said, although Vanity Fair profiles of them were adulatory. Brown, who liked to say she seldom watched television or went to movies, put Beverly Hills 90210 heartthrob Luke Perry on the cover of the magazine while telling friends that she had never seen the show that made him a star.

  “Hollywood has no romance for me because I grew up practically in the lap of Margaret Rutherford,* and people like her,” Brown said. “I saw nightmare egos all day long in the movie business, and I wanted no part of it.”

  Once, when planning a cover story on Sylvester Stallone, an editor suggested assigning the piece to acerbic critic James Wolcott, a writer whose work Brown admired. “What’s the sense in wasting Wolcott on Stallone?” Brown said. “He’s such a bore…. In some profound way, he’s a joke to me. There’s something deeply camp about Stallone romping on the beach with this bimbo [his girlfriend].” The profile was given to writer Kevin Sessums, a good friend of David Geffen’s who had once worked in public relations. When someone protested that Sessums sometimes got a touch weak in the knees over his subjects, Brown replied, “It really doesn’t matter what the story says.” Then she added with a smirk: “Stallone is right up Kevin’s street, actually.”

  Brown for the most part, only put proven Hollywood icons like Cruise and Madonna on the cover of Vanity Fair, but because there are only so many stars of the caliber Brown wanted, she began recycling cover subjects, adding to her anxiety that Vanity Fair’s formula was growing stale. Brown also grew increasingly concerned about how her fluffy, flashy magazine was going to age. She told associates that she was worried that Vanity Fair was too lightweight and “too gay” and needed to “go straight.” “Americans have completely overdosed on celebrity,” she said. “The pretentiousness of social life in the eighties will subside. Replacing it will be privileged men and women recharging the landscape.”

  Brown was so determined to tap into the serious Zeitgeist she saw looming, that in 1990 she took Ellen Barkin off the cover and replaced the actress with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Barkin was furious—she claimed that the only reason she had agreed to do the interview was that she was promised a cover—and she threatened to sue. By then, Brown knew she was too powerful for Barkin to fight with her. “It would be a bad career move,” Brown said dismissively. Explaining her new, politically engaged priorities, she explained, “My passion is to put, for example, El Salvador on the cover and still have strong newsstand sales.”

  So, in 1992, when Si Newhouse offered Tina Brown the reins of the esteemed but financially troubled New Yorker, she grabbed them. “Seriousness will be sexy again,” she declared. “Substance is back in style.” She had taken gossip upscale; now she was convinced she would be able to take intellectualism mainstream. What she ended up doing, however, was extending the tabloid sensibility and culture of celebrity into the realm of literary journalism. While Brown ran some important and intelligent articles, those were often overshadowed by the “buzz” generated by fawning profiles of movie stars and Hollywood moguls as exemplified by the time Brown asked Roseanne to guest edit a special woman’s issue. Longtime New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow quit after a sixteen-page photo spread of the O. J. Simpson case, including Kato Kaelin blow-drying his hair. “For you to kiss the ass of celebrity culture at this moment that way,” Trow wrote in his resignation letter, “is like selling
your soul to get close to the Hapsburgs—in 1913.”* Brown had no choice but to go in for glitz, said her defenders. “The patient was moribund and the new doctor had take drastic measures to revive it—including regular colonics of power and celebrity,” said writer John Seabrook. “Now that the patient seems to be getting healthier, hopefully the Barry Diller enemas can be cut back.” That seemed unlikely. Brown, who truly did love good writing and incisive thinking, was falling victim to the celebrity culture that she was instrumental in creating, the New Yorker under Brown was reduced to holding regular “roundtables” for advertisers with celebrity lures, including a special lunch, attended by Elton John and Lauren Hutton, to celebrate the unveiling of a ten-page Gianni Versace advertising insert.

  In March 1994, shortly before the Academy Awards, Brown held a party in Hollywood to celebrate the New Yorker’s first Hollywood issue. Three hundred guests mingled under a billowing white tent in the garden of the Bel Air Hotel. Five hundred white paper lanterns glowed on the assembled stars and potentates as they exchanged air kisses and industry gossip; they buzzed about how Emma Thompson had shown up without husband Kenneth Branagh; they fussed over Lassie, who was there to promote a new video and a new line of Lassie products; and they discussed what to wear to the upcoming Academy Awards. The topic of the evening, however, was the magnitude of the names that Tina Brown had attracted. At one table Anjelica Huston giggled with Shirley MacLaine; at another Whoopi Goldberg chatted with Oliver Stone; at another, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening cuddled for the cameras. At table number thirteen sat Michael Ovitz, Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw, Ralph Fiennes, United Artists chief John Calley, Barbra Streisand—and Tina Brown. “This is as much Hollywood power as anyone can muster,” producer Joel Silver marveled.