Dish (31 page)

As soon as the presidential handlers left, Benson pulled out a seamless white backdrop, set up his lights, and transformed the map room into a studio. When Nancy and Ronald Reagan appeared—he in a tux and she in a glittering black floor-length dress and a five-strand pearl choker—Benson popped in a Frank Sinatra tape and “Nancy with the Laughing Face” began to play. Reagan’s handlers were clearly unhappy with the way Benson and Brown had manipulated the situation. The President himself was flummoxed; he didn’t want to be photographed dancing, but the first lady knew a good photo op when she saw one, and she insisted. Before long, the Reagans were fox-trotting for Benson,
while the Argentinean president was left to study the table settings.

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 first 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.