Through the Looking Glass: Tina Brown’s “Vanity Fair Diaries”
I’ve long been an admirer of Tina Brown, the British editor who took New York City by storm in the eighties, resurrecting “Vanity Fair” and “The New Yorker” and being professionally wooed by most media barons of the day. She could have been in the movies.
This was not about buzz, as Brown would say often. It was about bringing a fresh view of magazine publishing to the states and translating those editorial and design changes into real money. Forget the celebrity and the endless parties that pervade this book. The measure of Ms. Brown’s success during the period covered (1983–1992) was in the P/L. The advertising and subscription revenue gains for “Vanity Fair” and “The New Yorker” were incredible by any standard and any period. Her publisher Conde Nast had found its savior.
The “Diaries” is a rollicking read, at times reading like fiction and at other times like a social calendar. In my notes I complain about all the Henry Kissinger dinner parties I had to attend but roar with delight reading everything about Norman Mailer, one of my favorite authors. I take Brown at her word that these diary entries were written on trains, planes and at night while tending to her children. This is the writer’s plight, of course. I have written novels on planes under less stressful circumstances. Her entries are very crisp, thoughtful, and speculative, with an outsider’s take on the publishing scene. At times I was concerned that the dated diary entries would result in a too rigid organization and some of the story-telling would be lost. Happily, I did not find this to be the case as the stories-within-stories, her struggles with the predominant male NYC publishing environment, and sensitive accounts of her husband Harry Evans, a media star in his own right, and their children come across as revealing and psychologically telling.
Along with her British pluck, Ms. Brown brought to the states a world view, an aesthetic sense and a nose for readers’ needs. She writes that what is lost in her book in perspective and omniscience is made up for in the immediacy of the information, the madcap, supercharged nature of her writing as she surfs through this gilded age of publishing.
Tina Brown writes at least twice in her book that twenty-five hundred magazines were published during the eighties in the states. That’s a remarkable number of titles for any period. Perhaps as Brown suggests this period of magazine publishing marked a time when well-funded editorial allowed for excellence as well as profit within a universe of stiff competition and community. Toward the end of this period, magazines were closing at the rate of three a week.
During Tina Brown’s recorded decade New York was a bubble in itself. She writes about the Trump Tower being covered with a façade of fool’s gold. Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” would come along about the time of the financial crisis in 1987. There was Big Hair, Madonna’s “Material Girl,” Miami Vice and finally the end of “Dynasty.”
This was when Princess Diana ruled the day and Brown had a keen interest in this fairytale world dating back to the time that she was editor of the British “Tatler.” Buckingham Palace might still be talking about Brown’s remark on American television that Prince Charles was “pussy-whipped.”
Tina Brown’s editorial eye was very good. In considering a profile of Rudy Giuliani her magazine was trying to figure out if he was a latter-day Eliot Ness or a media-hungry careerist. Brown nailed Trump early on as a con man who might find support with the American public. She recounts a time at a party when Trump poured wine down the back of Marie Brenner, a VF writer, because he was offended by a negative article.
Brown writes: “The sneaky, petulant infant was clearly still stewing about her (Brenner’s) takedown in VF over a year ago… What a coward! He couldn’t even confront her to her face! Marie was as outraged as she was incredulous but chose to ignore it. Everyone knows he is going broke and he spent most of the evening canoodling with his pouty blow-up doll Marla Maples.”
Central to Brown’s successful conquest of American magazine publishing was her ability to read social trends and cultural shifts. Getting ready to go on maternity leave for the birth of her daughter, Brown realizes she has no cover photo for the Holiday Issue. She got cold feet putting Trump’s new squeeze, Marla Maples, on the cover and decided on Cher. Now she needed a cover for when she was on leave. She writes: “in a spirit of reinventing the cultural mood, I am using an insane Annie picture of Roseanne Barr on top of her husband Tom Arnold, her huge bosoms squeezing out of a swimsuit, with inside photos of them mud wrestling half-naked. Proletarian chic is all the rage. Nothing could be sexier. Nothing could be sexier at the moment than a fat guy in a wife-beater vest, frolicking around with a roly-poly wife. Ralph Lauren will have a heart attack, but I will be on leave so won’t have to hear the flak.”
Brown recalls later that the cover was universally reviled and Wal-Mart went bat shit.
Tina Brown had become a media star in her own right. The New York Times called her “the gold-dust fairy,” praising her for increasing writers’ payments, attracting new talent, changing the literary marketplace, and contributing significantly to the bottom line.
Newsweek credited her with revising VF, bringing to the title “A fresh eye, an advanced sense of mischief and fingertips sensitive to the arrhythmic pulse of the eighties.” She was a “brightly polished red Porsche cruising down the highway.” Brown seemed to accept all this praise with grace, irony and British understatement.
Brown notes in her introductory remarks that her book was about publishing, not politics. President Reagan and his wife Nancy show up for the archetypal VF cover. American military forays into the Middle East hurt magazine sales. Towards the end of the eighties, NYC seems a little darker. Brown notices more homeless on the street. And AIDS deaths are increasing at an alarming rate, including some of Brown’s closest friends.
But the good times continued to roll. The naked, pregnant Demi Moore cover photo on VF in July, 1991, was a best seller with coverage across the globe. This editorial decision was visceral and strategic. Brown writes: “We have wanted so much to do a story that moved VF decisively on from the eighties, that made a statement of modernity, progressiveness, freshness, openness, after the heavy Trumpy glitz of that decade. I have been beating my brains out looking for the social commentary that would achieve it. And now, in one simple, dazzling image, Annie has the home run. This is it. This is what celebrity looks like in the nineties. Not just natural but au naturel! And it’s a wonderful feminine statement at the same time.”
By July 1992 Tina Brown was ready to become editor of “The New Yorker.” It was a perilous time. The magazine was losing nineteen million dollars a year. She replaced 71 of 120 staff members. She was the “Joseph Stalin in high heels.”
I received this book as a gift and it turned out to be exactly that. I was especially struck with how prescient Brown was about cultural and social matters, recognizing some of the darker instincts we see play out in contemporary American politics.
There is also a grace evident in this writing and an appreciation for America, for Conde Nast, and all the help she had along the way. The entries about her husband and two children are loving and tender, showing a side of Brown that is a pleasant counterpoint to the main narrative.
I thoroughly recommend this book.
