Dish (29 page)

A year after the Robin Williams episode, after only two years at the helm of
People,
Gaines left the magazine to run
Life.
Sources at Time Inc. say that while profits were up 44 percent under Gaines, the company’s management felt the magazine had become, in its pursuit of controversy, too much like a tabloid. The new editor, Lanny Jones, set out to reestablish the trust of the Hollywood community. But by then, stars didn’t need
People
anymore. They had found a new celebrity-friendly magazine that gave them status and adulation that they had not dreamed possible. It was so upscale and glossy that it made
People
look like the
National Enquirer.

Tina Brown, wearing a cleavage-baring blood red dress with lips and nails painted to match, vamped for a photographer as a crowd of spectators gathered around the Conde Nast conference room, clutching their bottles of Evian and watching in awe. The editor of
Vanity Fair
tossed back her head and smiled mischievously on that spring day in 1989, her blond hair and pearl choker shimmering under the bright lights while Annie Liebowitz,
Vanity Fair’s
star photographer, took pictures for a profile scheduled to run on the cover of
Newsweek.
There once was a time, only a few years earlier, when a news magazine would have balked at such a cozy arrangement, but in the five years since Tina Brown had taken over
Vanity Fair,
she had rewritten the rules of journalism. While most mainstream magazines at least had pretenses of journalistic integrity and concern for the good of society,
Vanity Fair
unapologetically pandered to the wealthy and powerful who controlled the magazine’s financial fate. Brown hired some of the world’s best-known writers and most talented photographers to chronicle the lives of movie stars, socialites, moguls, and Euro-trash; the magazine celebrated fame, power, and whatever it took
to get there. “I’m bored with these suppressed style snobs who say it’s brave for an actress to play a bag lady,” Brown said. “Ravish and polish are what I’m aiming for.”

There were still those who sneered at
Vanity Fair
as an upscale
People
—or worse. As one magazine critic quipped, “Look, Muffy, a
National Enquirer
for us.” Brown took gossip and celebrity journalism off the supermarket racks and put it on the coffee tables of the richest and most influential people in the country. In one issue, Patti Davis revealed her penchant for masturbation, Priscilla Presley discussed her thwarted romance with Julio Iglesias, and Mickey Rourke grimly recounted being “hit on” by transvestites when he worked as a bouncer in a crossdressers’ club. Gene Pope invented the supermarket tabloid, Dick Stolley took it mainstream, Rupert Murdoch made it mass market, and Tina Brown took it upscale.

To get the cooperation of tabloid-shy celebrities,
Vanity Fair
made deals with subjects. Sometimes the deals were explicit, written agreements promising covers or photo and text approval; sometimes implicit, such as when Mick Jagger objected to a writer who was interviewing him because she kept asking questions about his past. Tina Brown assigned a different writer.
Vanity Fair
would go so far to make a celebrity happy that when Herb Ritts was shooting Warren Beatty for a cover, one of the photographer’s assistants reportedly bared her breasts to get a smile out of the sulky actor. There was almost nothing
Vanity Fair
wouldn’t do to get the cooperation of the rich and famous.

Vanity Fair’s
formula was such a hit with the public and advertisers that other publications were forced to follow or be left behind. Magazines had to put celebrities on their covers or die on the newsstands next to those that did. At Conde Nast,
GQ
took up the formula, then
Details,
then
Vogue
and the other women’s magazines. Soon, news magazines like
Time
and
Newsweek
regularly had celebrity covers. New arrivals like
Premiere
and
Entertainment Weekly
joined the fray. “Movie magazines used to be a category,” Gore Vidal lamented. “Now, everything is a movie magazine.” Some publications, like
Esquire,
for years tried to resist doing exclusively celebrity covers, but circulation and advertising suffered. Only about twenty-five stars were big enough to
guarantee newsstand sales. To get those celebrities, editors had to offer arrangements as attractive as
Vanity Fair’s.
Big stars would agree to a cover photo with the publication that made the most attractive offer. It was usually
Vanity Fair.
Journalists in
News-week’s
San Francisco bureau were outraged by the way the rules were changing, and they suggested that the magazine do a tough profile of this British invader who was corrupting the values of the industry and packaging tabloid stories as upscale news.

Brown wasn’t surprised when she heard about
Newsweek’
s plans. Although she had won over the readers, the subjects, and the advertisers, many in the press were still quite hard on her. There were some favorable articles—
Adweek,
for example, named Brown hottest editor of the year in 1986—but Brown was continually ridiculed in elite media circles.
*
Brown knew she had to change that. “I had to win the opinion of my peers,” she said. “I had to seduce the media.”

When Brown sat down for an interview with
Newsweek
writer Tom Mathews, she turned on all of her considerable charm. She peppered her conversation with literary references, dismissing critics in a “silvery voice,” said Mathews, that was “rippling with London elegance above Manhattan’s barbaric yawp.” Mathews rhapsodized over “the beauty who married the rakish Harold Evans,” her “uptown élan and Front Page gusto,” and the way her ankles were “sculpted into her drop-dead stiletto high heels.”

Tina Brown had a beguiling way of leaning over and “confiding” tidbits to interviewers. Explaining how she rescued
Vanity Fair
from the dreary staff she had inherited, Brown did her best
Dynasty
persona: “We had quite a little blood around here,” she laughed. “It was rather like
Scarface.”
As she chatted, Brown leaned so far forward that, according to people who spoke with Mathews after the interview, her ample bosom escaped from her décolletage. Brown blushed as she adjusted her neckline and continued
the interview. After Mathews left, Brown called a colleague and announced, “We have nothing to worry about.”

When Mathews handed in his article, mayhem erupted at
Newsweek.
If anything, the
Vanity Fair
editor had worked her magic too well. There were screaming fights over whether the profile should run—much less as a cover story. “It was panting,” said assistant managing editor Dominique Browning. “There was way too much heavy breathing. It was sexist. It was embarrassing.” The alleged breast incident was a topic of much discussion around the office. “From the way Tom described it, she might have just been leaning way over,” according to a colleague. “I can’t absolutely say whether he saw any nipple, but he clearly saw more than he could handle. It obviously affected his thinking. The article gushed so much that it dripped.”

After several heated meetings, the profile was taken off the cover. “It just didn’t belong there,” Browning said. “There was no substance to it.” The article was passed directly to executive editor Steve Smith—rather than the standard route of going to an assistant managing editor first—prompting outcries of favoritism because
Vanity Fair
had excerpted a book by Smith’s wife, Sally Bedell Smith. Even Steve Smith, however, was concerned about the tone of the profile. “Tom, one general observation on my third read,” Smith wrote in a memo to Mathews, “I think we’re being too friendly.” One phrase that bothered him, for example, was Mathews’s line: “To her presentations, Brown brought Jane Austen’s ironic sensibility and Ayn Rand’s will to power.”

“Forgive me in advance, Mr. Princeton Man,” Smith noted. “Is this Rand or Nietzsche? A tiny voice makes me think the latter.” Rand and Austen were edited out of the piece and some skepticism was edited in, but even in its toned-down state, the
Newsweek
profile drooled. “Watching her is like watching a brightly polished red Porsche cruising down the highway at 55 miles an hour,” the article concluded. “Given what she’s got under the bonnet, if she really guns it, no one’s going to catch her.”

By the time the
Newsweek
article appeared, Tina Brown had won. She had seduced the media. It was a seduction that had begun long ago.

White paper bells fluttered in a hot August breeze and a Handel concerto blared out of the shrubbery at Grey Gardens where Ben Bradlee had tucked a tape player. The executive editor of the
Washington Post
and Sally Quinn, his wife and star writer, were preparing their East Hampton vacation house for a spur-of-the-moment wedding of another May-December media couple: Their good friend, fifty-three-year-old Harold Evans, was marrying
his
former star writer, twenty-seven-year-old Tina Brown.

It was Thursday, August 19, 1981, and Harold Evans was the most distinguished journalist in all of England, the editor of the august
Times
of London, as well as the
Sunday Times
of London. Tina Brown’s detractors saw the romance as yet another one of her shrewd career moves—not that her professional life needed any boosts. In 1981, Brown was one of the hottest young journalists in London.

Tina Brown had not always planned to become a writer; she was a gifted mimic and at one point wanted to be an actress. Her father, George Brown, a producer of B-movies, encouraged his precocious daughter’s endeavors. “Who shall we have to dinner to massage the Iranian/Swiss/Belgian money?” he would ask; afterward he would delight in angelic-looking little Tina’s scathing impersonations of the guests. Tina was kicked out of boarding school three times—once for writing that a teacher’s bosoms were “an unidentified flying object.” After one expulsion, George Brown told the headmistress, “How depressing for you to know that you failed with this talented child.” Despite her checkered school record, Tina entered Oxford when she was only sixteen years old.
*
She tried acting, but her father, who was once married to actress Maureen O’Hara, said that Tina found the endeavor “a rather depressing experience.” Brown once worried that she was “fat and not amusing enough” and she was terribly shy. “I was the token crud at the parties who spent the
whole evening reading record covers,” she once confessed, “but then I would go home and write this savage reportage about everybody else’s ludicrousness.” Brown turned her talent for ridiculing people’s foibles into a journalism career. While at Oxford, her boyfriend Stephen Glover, who would go on to help found London’s
Independent,
had an appointment to interview noted writer Auberon Waugh. Tina insisted on accompanying Glover, inserted herself into the conversation, and charmed Waugh, who invited her to a lunch at Private Eye. Brown wrote a wickedly funny account of the event, which was noticed by
Daily Mail
gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, who introduced Brown to the top editors of Fleet Street.