How I Got There
Sunday, April 10, 1983
I am here in NYC at last, brimming with fear and insecurity. Getting in late last night on British Airways, I suddenly felt the enormousness of New York City, the noise of it, the speed of it, the lonely obliviousness of so many people trying to get ahead. My London bravado began to evaporate. I wished I was with Harry, who I knew would be sitting at his computer in front of his study window, in Kent, furiously pounding away about Rupert Murdoch.
I am staying at the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-Fourth Street, opposite the Algonquin Hotel. It’s a bit of a fleapit but in walking distance to the Condé Nast HQ at 350 Madison Avenue. The man at the desk seemed half-asleep when I checked in and there was no one around to haul my bag to the elevator. All the way in from JFK in the taxi, a phone-in show was blaring a woman with a rasping German accent talking in excruciating detail about blow jobs. The instructions crackling from the radio to “tek it in the mouth und move it slowly, slowly up und down” got so oppressive I asked the cabdriver what the hell he was listening to. He said it was a sex therapist called Dr. Ruth who apparently gives advice on the radio and has an enormous following.
As soon as I woke up I rushed to the newsstand on the corner to look for the April issue of Vanity Fair. The second edition is even more baffling than the first one I saw in London in February.
So begin my Vanity Fair diaries, scribbled over the years in blue school exercise books late at night after dinners, or on planes to London, or in a book-lined aerie overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Quogue on Long Island, or in the small hours of the morning when I couldn’t get back to sleep after a midnight bottle feed of one of my two children. When, in 2015, I started to look into the diaries again, my intention was to use them as a refresher for a book I was thinking of about the Crazy Eighties. But the more I read the more I realized I had already written one.
The writer of a memoir or a history knows from the outset where the story is going and how it will end. The diarist doesn’t have a clue what’s around the corner. All one can know about is the past and, with any luck, the onrushing present. That’s a feature of the form, not a bug. What you lose in omniscience and perspective you gain in heedless immediacy and suspense.
Opening the volumes I was amazed to rediscover how madcap those days and years were—how chancy, how new, how supercharged. And I found that the recklessness of the telling—so many instant insights as often to be regretted as vindicated—was the way to surf the eighties, at the speed those years were lived.
Let me forewarn. These were years spent amid the moneyed elite of Manhattan and LA and the Hamptons in the overheated bubble of the world’s glitziest, most glamour-focused magazine publishing company, Condé Nast, during the Reagan era. Please don’t expect ruminations on the sociological fallout of trickle-down economics. My Vanity Fair did its share of investigative reporting on the crimes and cruelties of politics and policy. But as day-to-day, night-to-night experience, this was the gilded, often egregious eighties as lived at the top. Today, when most of the time I yearn to be under my duvet at night bingeing on Netflix’s latest noir heart-pounder, I am blown away by the sheer number of dinners, galas, and cocktail parties I attended as editor in chief of Vanity Fair. The social energy of the eighties in New York was ferocious. When did I sleep? (It turns out to have been an asset that I am allergic to alcohol. Most of these accounts of dinner parties probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d had a glass in my hand.)
By the time I became editor in chief of Vanity Fair in January 1984, Ronald Reagan was on a glide path to reelection. He had made an improbable journey from radio announcer to midlevel movie star to union leader to television host to two-term governor of California to president of the United States.
Reagan’s ascent to the White House marked the definitive end of one era—that of the turbulent 1960s and its threadbare seventies endgame—and the supersonic launch of another gilded age. Tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981 unleashed animal spirits on Wall Street. There were new buzzwords like “junk bonds” and “arbitrage.” Go-getters in suspenders, their eyes ablaze with the thrill of winning, thrived in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it when asked to define the eighties, we “borrowed a trillion dollars from the foreigners and used the money to throw a big party.”
The Reagan White House set the social pace of the most visible stratum of American high life. With her huge coiffed movie-star head and tiny, svelte body in ruby-red Adolfo suits, Nancy Reagan was the reigning star of John Fairchild’s Seventh Avenue and society bible, W, the oversized fashion monthly that was sister of his powerful retail newspaper Women’s Wear Daily. The Reagans filled the East Room and the State Dining Room and the pages of <W with A-listers, B-listers, and Hollywood Squares C-listers. Nancy’s devoted gay “walkers”—social escorts from the world of fashion and decorating—always stood ready to ditch their Bel Air and Park Avenue circles for the heady whirl of formal dinners and luncheons in the executive mansion.
The American media world for which I was headed in the early eighties was enjoying an era of blockbuster confidence. The gatekeepers to what was not yet called “content”—the studio heads, network chiefs, major-label music honchos, Hollywood agents—were stars themselves. In publishing, paying outlets for writers and photographers—cash-cow newspaper chains, prosperous publishing houses, ad-stuffed magazines—were legion. There were twenty-five hundred new magazines launched between 1979 and 1989. To be the editor of Time or Newsweek was to be a demigod.
Meanwhile, pop culture was all about the shiny surface—high voltage, high volume. Even porn became high gloss. On television, Dynasty was big: big hair, big money, big ratings. The slick tire-squealer Miami Vice, whose heroes drove Ferraris in sequences spliced with rock video montages and were unafraid to wear pastel tees with white linen suits, made its debut on September 16, 1984. “Material Girl,” the monster hit song in which Madonna celebrates affluence and scorns romance, came out a few months later. In the video, her hard-edged Marilyn Monroe impersonation has the unapologetic ersatz fabulousness that defined female glamour in the eighties. In New York, the decade’s biggest signifier would turn out to be a building, not a person: Trump Tower, the very definition of ersatz with its fool’s-gold facade, its flashy internal waterfall, its dodgy financing.
More broadly, these were the years when America began lurching toward serious economic inequality. Those big tax cuts for the rich combined with big cuts in social spending squeezed America’s vaunted middle class at both ends.
In the New York of 1984, it was either the sedan or the sidewalk. Martin Amis’s Money was published in January 1984, and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City in August, and both captured the mood—doomy, self-destructive, even hopeless, but at the same time soaringly ambitious. The big artists were Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf: graffiti-making urchins who were plucked from the streets like fairy-tale paupers and made princes of the galleries and salons. And as the sidewalks were filling with the homeless, the adjacent streets were filling with stretch limos—a moment that would be nicely captured, as so many were, by Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, which came out in 1987, right after the October stock market crash of that year. Oscillating between these worlds, New York City often felt on the brink. My diaries are full of moments when the uneasy sense of precariousness intrudes.
In April 1983 when the entries begin, I was professionally listless after four years as a successful magazine editor in London.
To recap, I was twenty-five in 1979 when I was invited to edit Tatler, a famous (if fading) monthly in London. This was an outlandish break for someone who had never edited anything, much less a magazine that trailed clouds of glory with a 270-year pedigree that included contributors such as Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels. By 1979, however, Tatler had become a skinny, shiny sheet, its circulation barely ten thousand. Its new owner, Gary Bogard, an Australian real estate entrepreneur unknown to London’s intelligentsia, had offered the job of resuscitation to pretty much every credible editor in town, without success.
At the time I was a freelance writer contributing frisky commentary to the leftish weekly New Statesman, which, under its great editor, the squash-faced Anthony Howard—known as “Fetus Features” by my fellow contributor Christopher Hitchens—was an older, more droll British cousin to The Nation or The New Republic. Howard had recruited me when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and his literary stable also included Julian Barnes, James Fenton, and Martin Amis, whose pieces often ran under a pseudonym, Bruno Holbrooke.
In addition to the New Statesman (or the Staggers, as we called it), I was writing for The Telegraph Sunday Magazine, mostly light stuff about London social trends. I also wrote for Punch, the venerable humor magazine, which at one point assigned me to dance for a set on a tabletop in a G-string at a bar in Hackensack, New Jersey, and tell the magazine’s aging readers what the life of a go-go dancer was like. That was when I began to reflect on how great it would be to be the one assigning the pieces instead of being assigned.
In the spring of 1979 Nigel Dempster, the influential Daily Mail gossip columnist and wag who was now advising Gary Bogard in his ambitions to turn the waning Tatler into a bona fide glossy, noticed my pieces. He told Bogard to forget about established names and go for youth.
It didn’t take long for me to discover that I loved being an editor.
As a movie producer’s daughter, I’d inherited a feel for what it takes to wrangle a story. My father, George H. Brown, was one of a happy, now vanished breed of Gentleman Film Producers who worked on contract for the Rank Organization at Pinewood Studios—the hub of the British film industry, headquartered in a converted country house estate twenty miles west of central London at Iver Heath. The Gentleman Producer prided himself on the high-low mix of his oeuvre: a broad comedy today, a costume drama tomorrow, a refined detective story the day after.
Dad produced over thirty feature films in his fifty-year career, from vintage dramas such as Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), Hotel Sahara (1951), and Desperate Moment (1953) to light comedies such as School for Secrets(1946), Vice Versa (1948, with his best friend, Peter Ustinov), and The Chiltern Hundreds (1949) to character pieces such as the BAFTA-winning Guns at Batasi (1964, starring Richard Attenborough and the ingenue Mia Farrow, recruited at the last moment when the original star, Britt Ekland, ran off with Peter Sellers).
Large, blond, and ebullient in his well-tailored suits, my father filled a room with his commanding height and broken nose. At Pinewood he met Bettina Kohr, the exotic-looking brunette who became my mother. She had worked as the assistant to Laurence Olivier on his adaptations of Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948, the first British film to win Hollywood’s Best Picture Oscar). She was a hilarious wit and a voracious reader. They stayed married for fifty years.
Throughout my childhood the Brown family lived in the idyllic Buckinghamshire hamlet of Little Marlow. Our brick-fronted Georgian house had large bay windows, like Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop. There was a tumbledown apple orchard at the back, and purple blooms of wisteria flourished around the windows and doors. Opposite the house was a broad meadow circled by majestic lime trees, where the yell of soccer and the plop of cricket provided the metronome of passing time.
I was born in 1953, five years after my brother, Christopher. An extremely nervous fair-haired little girl—known then as Cristina—I was desperately shy, wailing for my mother at other children’s parties.
Mum had chosen to become a full-time wife, devoted to her husband’s life and business and to us. Christopher and I would have hated losing her exclusive involvement in our happy world. She was our partner in crime, the divine muse and clever mimic who dreamed up stories, saw through phonies, and headed off bores. Every morning of lower school she drove me to Rupert House in Henley-on-Thames, crammed into her bright red three-wheel bubble car. I was proud of how different she looked from the other mums waiting outside for their charges at four o’clock. Next to all their careful bouffants and boringly decorous pearls she was statuesque and striking, with her raven hair pulled back in a bun and her dangly turquoise earrings. Her diva looks radiated dangerous glamour.
In our house at Little Marlow there was a wild love of stories and a passion to find, hear, read, see, and tell them. My father was always in search of a “cracking good yarn” to bring to the screen. The Sunday papers were a story quarry. So was the pile of books and scripts we took on family vacations. While we were at school Mum would be at her portable typewriter, pounding out potential film “treatments” for Dad, sparked by the novels that arrived in a box once a week from the Harrods lending library, culled from her perusal of Books and Bookmen and The Listener. As soon as I was a sentient being I was included in the discussions of how to get a story “done”—the chase, the seduction, the patient persistence required to carve vivid characters and narrative lines from a writer’s original material and bring it to the screen. My father did a lot of that. When he was on deadline, locked in the dining room with a screenwriter, Christopher (himself a future film producer) and I knew better than to interrupt.
And then there were the parties. Our parents loved playing host. Propinquity to Pinewood made our Buckinghamshire home into the unlikely soundstage for their rolling postproduction festivities, with a cast of rising starlets, operatic art directors, tragic comediennes, moody directors, on-the-make leading men, the odd literary lion, and whichever squat Turkish financier had put up 20 percent of the production money. They would roll up in their Bentleys and Jags for the wrap parties in our big, beamed living room with French windows that opened out onto the lawn. During the holiday season you could spot the latest James Bond or the star of a Carry On comedy lying contentedly inebriated under the Christmas tree. Like the ingredients of my father’s lovingly concocted summer sangria, the social mix was full of interesting flavors. I once watched my mother introduce the elderly literary legend Dame Rebecca West—a neighbor who shared Mum’s passion for murder investigations—to the double entendre specialist TV comedian Benny Hill. The great lady of letters bent down and examined him as if he were a vivisected newt.
My parents, like their peers in the Bucks Beverly Hills, had one foot in show business and the other in the local squirearchy, reflected in their choice of our schools. I attended a series of turreted academies with horsey debs and Country Life Camillas. My shyness faded by middle school and I became a ringleader. I’d usually do well for a year or two, garnering alphas in English and history and spending long hours in my huge owl spectacles, transcribing Shakespeare’s sonnets into my journal with an Osmiroid italic-nibbed fountain pen. Then I’d suddenly stage a rebellion.
My crimes were never then-cool modern subversions like smoking hash or hiding copies of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. They were always crimes of attitude. I was bounced from Godstowe, a frowning single-sex day school on a Buckinghamshire hill, for writing an end-of-term play in which Godstowe was blown up and replaced by a public lavatory. I was bounced, too, from Oakdene, a starchy boarding establishment in Beaconsfield I was sent to next for two brief but eventful semesters.
My parents were always magnificent in these disciplinary altercations. They showed up looking confident and serene, and listened with wonder to the tale of their daughter’s unrecognizable delinquencies. “How very sad it must be for you to have failed with this unusual girl,” my father gently told the mono-bosomed headmistress, Miss Havard, before loading up the car with my trunk and speeding us off to the refuge of Little Marlow, my mother staring proudly ahead.
My final foray was Hampden House, an exclusive girls’ school in Great Missenden. Somehow, in a considerable feat, my parents got me a place there without admitting I had been expelled from Oakdene for calling Miss Havard’s bosom in a discovered diary an “unidentified flying object.”
At most boarding schools of the era, few of the 250-girl school population, many of them daughters of earls and honorables, attempted to go on to university. Most chose instead to learn china mending at Sotheby’s or attend finishing school in Switzerland. But what Hampden House, once the family home of John Hampden, a Roundhead hero of the English Civil War, lacked in academics it made up for in atmosphere, stimulating my passion for history and drama. This time the play I wrote—and produced and directed—was about Henry VIII and his six wives.
True to form, I quickly found a way to blow the temporary acclaim. One of Hampden House’s odder regulations decreed that we had to wear two pairs of underwear: one of white cotton and, over it, a voluminous pair of gray flannel overknickers. Plus, we were forbidden to change our underpants more than three times a week. The year was 1968, and one cold spring afternoon, I led fifty marching girls across the lacrosse field, waving placards that read end knicker madness and chanting “Knickers out out out! Knickers in in in!”
But it was me who was out. Soon my parents were once again loading my belongings into the trunk of the car for the one-way journey back to Little Marlow.
In despair, my parents sent me to Beechlawn Tutorial College in Oxford, a “crammer” for a floating population of foreigners and hopeless rich girls who had dropped out of real school but wanted to try for Oxford or Cambridge anyway. Girls were billeted around the town of Oxford in faculty-approved digs and sent here and there to individual sessions with tutors. (I was lodged at a convent where the nuns forced you to read over dinner, which was absolutely fine with me.) My tutor, the excellent Alison Holmes, made me double down on my English literary studies, as storytelling and criticism were where I excelled. In March of 1971, when I was all of seventeen, Mrs. Holmes decided I was ready for the entrance exam to Oxford. It’s remarkable that with such a checkered academic record I somehow got in, but British academia was very different then. The trio of condescending dons who decided your fate at the all-important interview wanted only to know if you could think. Oxford would take care of the rest.
The telegram arrived for me six weeks later in Paris, where I was on a student exchange trip, learning French while tearing around to discos every night in the beat-up Citroën of a friend of my host family. It read, pleased to inform offering place at st anne’s college oxford stop.
I went up to St. Anne’s six months later, in October of 1971, to “read” (i.e., major in) English. St. Anne’s was still all-female in those days, of course, and disappointingly un-medieval in its architecture. I instantly envied what the boys had, the spires of Magdalen and Christ Church and Brasenose and all that Brideshead Revisited scenic bliss.
But St. Anne’s in the seventies was the most intellectually exciting of the women’s colleges. The great novelist Iris Murdoch adorned its English faculty. So did the incomparable teacher Dorothy Bednarowska, an Anne Bancroft brunette whose deeply hooded eyes, elegant black-stockinged legs, and crackling asperity riveted us. “Mrs. Bed” served her students sherry and smoked slim, sophisticated cigarettes that accumulated quivering towers of ash as she applied her relentless rigor to the texts of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. She demanded relentless rigor in return. Her forensic deconstruction of Dr. Lydgate’s frailties in Middlemarch was a tour de force of literary castration. I worshipped her. She taught me not only the joy of deep textual study—critical for an editor—but also the edgy pride of being at an all-women’s college. From our first tutorial I never again pined for what the boys had.
Instead, I dived into all the glories that Oxford could offer in student drama, journalism, and Zuleika Dobson romance. I was swept off my feet in sophomore year by Martin Amis, then a twenty-three-year-old literary lothario who had graduated by then but still had deep roots in Oxford. He was small and Jaggeresque, his chief charms his voice, a rich, iconoclastic croak, and the blond hair that curled onto the collar of his velvet jackets. Martin and I met at a London literary party, where we broke the ice by chatting about the current issue of the New Statesman. I remarked that I had a particular passion for the work of the Staggers contributor Bruno Holbrooke. It was a longer evening than I expected after that.
At Oxford, I wrote and produced a play—Under the Bamboo Tree, about a love triangle—that was chosen for the Edinburgh Festival and the London Fringe and won the Sunday Times Student Drama Award. And I signed on as a writer for the (now unfortunately named) student magazine, Isis. It was edited by one of my closest friends, then and now: Sally Emerson, later an acclaimed novelist, who married her Oxford boyfriend, Peter Stothard. (Two decades later he became editor of The Times, then of the Times Literary Supplement.)
At Isis I discovered that journalism was a wonderful excuse to satisfy the curiosity I possess in abundance. If you read or hear something that pings your antennae, you have license to pick up the phone and launch a barrage of intrusive questions. Until that moment I had imagined myself as a novelist or a playwright. But tracking down real people and learning the truth about them now seemed much more exciting than making stuff up. And I learned that there is no fun in the world greater than the frenzy of closing a magazine on deadline.
A boyfriend at Wadham College, Stephen Glover, who in 1986 would go on to cofound The Independent, drove me to Somerset one day to interview a son of my literary hero Evelyn Waugh for an Isis series on distinguished Oxford alumni. Auberon Waugh, known as Bron, was himself a prolific, acerbic, lethally funny literary critic, novelist, and columnist for The Spectator and Private Eye. Physically he resembled his father: he had his little potbelly, sandy pate, and rimless glasses. But I loved him for his wit, and for a decade after our meeting we conducted a prolific, romantically charged pen friendship. He introduced me to half the literary names of London, including Nigel Dempster, and he invited me to a lunch then considered as cool as an invitation backstage at a Dylan concert: the biweekly Private Eye hackfest upstairs at a Soho pub, the Coach and Horses. My Isis account of that lunch, in which I made as much fun of the Eye staff as they did of the politicians they sometimes invited, launched me as an enfant terrible of the British media. The Eye got its revenge by referring to me ever after as “the buxom hackette,” but the piece, and my subsequent contributions to the Staggers, caught the eye of the most important editor working in Fleet Street.
Harold Evans, known to almost everyone as Harry and as of 2004 to Buckingham Palace as Sir Harold, reigned for fourteen years as the fearless, crusading editor of the UK’s most admired quality newspaper, The Sunday Times. One of his achievements was creating a model for investigative journalism, the anonymous Insight team, celebrated among much else for exposing the top British spy, Kim Philby, as a Russian agent as well as the malfeasance of the drug company that created the great Thalidomide disaster. (In 2002, readers of the Press Gazette and the British Journalism Review would vote Harry the greatest British newspaper editor of all time, which has made it even harder for me to win an argument.)
Lunching with him one day, Pat Kavanagh, the influential (and stunningly beautiful) literary agent, thrust some clips of my New Statesman articles and my Isis piece on Private Eye into Harry’s hand. “Read these,” she commanded.
I didn’t hear anything for weeks. The Sunday Times was in the thick of investigating the defective design of a DC-10 that had killed 346 passengers. Then, one afternoon, I got a call from the office of Mr. Evans and was asked to come around to the paper’s headquarters to see him. The fact that the mighty Mr. E had read my insignificant jottings (on a train journey to Manchester, he later told me) and actually wanted to meet me was, to me, heart-stopping.
I arrived at the gray fortress of great journalism on Grays Inn Road near King’s Cross ten minutes early. His secretary, the redoubtable Joan Thomas, told me to wait outside. Mr. Evans, she said firmly, was working on the front page and could not be disturbed. An hour ticked by, and then another. She suggested I come back the next day but I said no, I’d rather wait. When she went to the bathroom I surged through Harry’s office door, determined to get my shot. Overcome by my own impudence, I froze. Amid a platoon of shirtsleeved editors grouped around a high layout table, my future husband was sketching out the front page. Looking up from the layouts, a pair of dazzling blue eyes met mine. “Don’t bother me now, love,” he said. (He has said it a lot since.) It’s fair to say that as I backed out of the room, I fell in love with his professional absorption.
I soon started writing for The Sunday Times. Less than a year later, when our affair bloomed in 1977, I chose to stop. Harry was still married and our affair was a scandale. Then came the call from Tatler.
All my lit-crit writer friends from Oxford thought I should decline the offer to undertake the revamp of Tatler. They thought that society magazines were inherently, irrevocably uncool. But I saw opportunity. Poring over musty bound volumes of old issues, I dreamed of a magazine that would combine the literary sharpness of the original eighteenth-century coffeehouse Tatler with the social exuberance of the Jazz Age iteration, overlaid with modern irreverence. Plus, it would be my own show. I could give an outlet to all the talent I knew was out there, much of it undiscovered. And, as I would realize only later, the timing was perfect.
The same month I took over the editorship of Tatler, in June 1979, a new prime minister took over 10 Downing Street.
After a long Labour government malaise climaxing in the “winter of discontent” of 1978–79, when every trade union went on the warpath, Margaret Thatcher’s ascendance and the Tory victory unleashed a thrusting upward mobility. It gave a new lease on life to the fraying upper middle classes. And there was another windfall for Tatler’s editorial fortunes and business prospects: Lady Diana Spencer’s emergence, rise, and conquest of Prince Charles and the British public. It was the twentieth century’s biggest social story since King Edward VIII traded the throne for Mrs. Simpson in 1936.
Lady Di’s world was Tatler’s world. She was nineteen; most of our staffers were only a few years older. Her life’s trajectory resembled that of many of my classmates at Hampden House. We were able to write about her world with insider-y insolence. Tatler became the go-to shop for every nuance of the royal romance. The Di story would be to Tatler what O. J. Simpson later was to CNN.
Editing Tatler with no experience, I often felt like William Boot, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s peerless Fleet Street satire Scoop, in which Boot, the timid, clueless country life correspondent of Lord Copper’s newspaper, the Daily Beast, is mistakenly sent to cover an inexplicable war in Africa.
By now I was living with Harry. Our Ponsonby Terrace house was nestled in a quiet Regency street behind the Tate Gallery. Ancient ivy festooned the old brick wall around the small back garden. I spent a lot of time creaking up and down the four flights of stairs to my study. On Fridays we would take off for serene writing weekends at a country cottage in Brasted, Kent. (Eventually, in 1981, when his divorce came through, we got married. The impromptu ceremony took place at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton home of the journalist Sally Quinn and the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, with a small gaggle of writer friends in attendance—on my side, Vogue’s Joan Buck, New York magazine’s Marie Brenner, and Nora Ephron; and on Harry’s side, his Sunday Times mate Anthony Holden, the Observer’s theater writer, John Heilpern—Joan’s British husband—and the Sunday Times’ gangly Northern Ireland correspondent David Blundy with his young daughter, Anna. Ben Bradlee hung a boom box in the bushes to play Handel’s Water Music, and Sally supplied a picnic wedding feast from Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack.)
Back at Ponsonby Terrace my illustrious husband offered me more and better on-the-fly editing tutorials than anything I could have obtained in a magazine training class. It was as true then as it is now that if you ask him a question about journalism, you are liable to get a seminar. When it came to Tatler’s page layout, I needed one. At home one evening when I was fretting over how to present a scoopy story about Princess Margaret and her social arbiter the Hon. Colin Tennant, he gave me a crash course in page design. He projected a photo of a crowded dance party in Mustique on our sitting room wall, zoomed in on Princess Margaret and her dancing partner, Tennant, and drew a rectangle around them in pencil on the peach wallpaper. The couple were now the vivid focus. My first lesson in picture cropping and my first double-page spread. I sometimes wonder if those red pencil marks are still there beneath the new owner’s wallpaper.
Tatler had a staff of just twelve and a miserly budget of a hundred thousand pounds a year. Our editing motto was: If you don’t have a budget, get yourself a point of view. Of necessity I wrote a good many of our pieces myself, including a spiky monthly guide to London’s eligible bachelors, which for obvious reasons appeared under a pseudonym, Rosie Boot. “What about an exciting émigré for a change?” reads a 1981 Rosie Boot entry. “Gregory Shenkman is half-Russian but wholly available and in a city overrun with effeminate one-shave-a-day men is refreshingly hairy.”
My early staff hires were young Turks with an abundance of attitude. They were critical to our success. All but one of those I will mention ended up crossing the Atlantic to join me at Vanity Fair, and their names will recur often in the pages ahead. Let’s call the roll.
Nicholas Coleridge, twenty-two, fresh out of Eton and Cambridge and an internship at Harpers & Queen, was the staff ideas-and-attitude kid. He had turbocharged social energy and wrote wicked, sharply observed pieces about the precocious world in which he nightly socialized. (He later rose to be president of the whole of Condé Nast International.)
Miles Chapman, twenty-seven, was the cranky, bitterly funny copy chief. When he arrived at Tatler he wore Rupert Bear sweaters and rimless glasses but soon shed fifteen pounds, dyed his hair inky blue, and became an avatar of gay style. He had a genius for the critical details—headlines, blurbs, captions—that define a magazine’s voice. His own absurdly overrefined accent was manufactured from an adolescence listening to classical music commentary and poetry recitals on BBC Radio 3 while hiding from an unpleasant stepfather in the bedroom of a humble semidetached house in Surrey.
Michael Roberts, Tatler’s fashion editor, stolen from the style pages of The Sunday Times, was the art-school graduate son of a black father posted to England after the war who left Michael’s mother, a secretary, pregnant. He wore the same oversized black cashmere roll-necks all year round and smoked long menthol cigarettes. Aloof, feline, with a smile of disarming sweetness when he sensed a target for satire, he was as clever with copy as he was with clothes. He led a vagabond life, rarely cashing a check, his own ineffable chicness often held together with safety pins, a fashion statement in itself.
Only one person could track where Michael was and what he was up to—his assistant, Gabé Doppelt, the petite daughter of rich South African parents. She was nineteen and in charge of classified ads when I arrived—an undemanding job, since there weren’t any—until I noticed that she was the queen of Get Shit Done, a role she played not just for me and Michael but for Anna Wintour when she joined her as her right hand at Vogue in New York in 1987.
A vital need in start-up chaos is a managing editor. I poached the preternaturally competent and diplomatic Chris Garrett from an ailing fashion magazine to crack the whip on Tatler’s deadlines and budget.
Finally, Sarah Giles. A society girl with a champagne personality who at the time was an exotic travel agent, Sarah was like something out of the Happy Valley set in Kenya in the 1930s, where some of her aristocratic forebears had indeed partied up a storm. She had no familiarity with matters editorial, but on a hunch I made her our features editor. She couldn’t and didn’t edit or write, but she had a talent I’ve considered crucial at every entity I’ve run: she could produce. She had a killer eye for a story and would beat the doors down to obtain access for a writer to get it done. The jingle of her dachshund’s chain (she always brought him to the office) followed by her booming laugh were the first sounds I heard when I got into the Tatler office in the morning.
Was it a coincidence that much of the talent at Tatler was comprised of rebels against the British class system? I tend to think it was the source of much of its energy and irreverence.
Tatler was soon giving our primary competitors, Harpers & Queen and Vogue, a run for their money. Thanks to Michael Roberts’s connections from his work at The Sunday Times, top-of-the-line photographers shot for us for next to nothing—Norman Parkinson, the society portraitist with the handlebar mustache; kinky, outrageous Helmut Newton; raffish David Bailey, who, because Tatler couldn’t afford the airfares, once drove me to Paris in his litter-strewn jeep for a cover shoot with his ex-wife Catherine Deneuve; Derry Moore, now the 12th Earl of Drogheda, whose impeccable taste gave us ravishing portfolios of beautiful houses and rooms.
The Tatler team was wildly competitive. British Vogue was the grandest galleon of the glossies and always got unquestioned access to the highlights of the social and fashion season. Its duchess-like editor, Beatrix Miller, used to small-wave people she was tired of talking to out of her office with a “That’s all” reminiscent of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. At lunchtime she would adjourn to the restaurant Apicella near Vogue House and accept obeisance from passing luminaries.
Tatler’s cover story on Princess Caroline of Monaco was a gratifying triumph over our lordly rivals at Vogue, who thought they had her in the bag. As it happened, Michael Roberts was a close friend of Manolo Blahnik, not yet the cult figure he became in Sex and the City but already the sophisticated Chelsea cobbler at Zapata, where all the smartest girls bought their shoes. After repeated nos from formal channels, a tip-off from Manolo got Tatler in the game. The word was that Her Serene Highness was personally coming into Zapata to try on a pair of gold sandals. I wrote a personal note requesting a cover shoot and Michael Roberts had my request slipped into the box she would open to try them on, thus circumnavigating her ferocious gatekeepers. Within weeks we were both on our way to the rosy portals of the Rainier palace in Monte Carlo for the shoot.
Tatler’s finest hour was the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in July 1981. I had first met the princess-to-be in 1980 at the American embassy, during her engagement to Charles. She wore a dress of white organza and blue sequined chiffon that revealed her pale young shoulders, her neck circled by the sheen of a pearl choker fastened with a diamond clip. Her skin was apricot velvet, her eyes huge blue pools of feeling. She was very young and very hesitant, always blushing before she spoke, then contributing lighthearted small talk that broke the ice with simplicity and charm. As both writer and editor, I tracked her for all the years that followed, till lunch in New York with me and Anna Wintour, during the summer of 1997, two months before she died. She had come for a charity auction of her dresses at Christie’s. By then she had long been an accomplished superstar, the hesitancy replaced by self-possession. She was a media goddess, turning every head as she strode across the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant in three-inch heels and a dazzling green Chanel suit. But her conversation at lunch was all about loneliness.
There was no foreboding of that in the summer of 1981. The royal wedding was a national expression of joy. Tatler flooded the zone in the months leading up to it with every angle, past, present, and future. Among the blizzard of pieces on her early life, Nick Coleridge contributed an extended caption masterpiece about Di’s flatmates. It began, “There are still a few girls left in Britain who haven’t been to bed with Jasper Guinness and all of them are friends of Lady Diana Spencer.” Beneath the passport-sized photo of a discreetly smiling country girl named Virginia Pitman, we ran this blurb:
Since leaving Hatherop Castle School, a spell behind the counter at Asprey’s has been followed by a Cordon Bleu cooking course and Cooking for Directors in the City. Her goldfish, Battersea, which is cosseted between plastic weeds from Harrods, is a perennial conversation piece.
“The goldfish,” said Miles Chapman on receipt of the copy to edit, “is fucking genius.”
Tatler’s newsstand numbers soared. We had taken the circulation from ten thousand to one hundred thousand and become the third big British glossy, alongside Vogue and Harpers & Queen. We were in profit and prospering, a grown-up monthly coffee-table magazine with perfect binding, fat advertising, and a voice that made news. One of the innovations Miles had come up with was a line on the spine of the magazine that summarized a mood. The one for the 1981 end-of-year holiday issue was “Deeper, Crisper, Breaking Even.” As a marker of how we’d become an authority on the Big Story I was asked to coanchor the NBC Today show’s royal wedding coverage from London with Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw.
When the excitement was over, Gary Bogard made a big decision. He sold Tatler to Condé Nast Publications for a million pounds. It was Condé Nast’s first new magazine title in Britain in twenty-five years. The sale was final in April of 1982. We decamped from our latest Covent Garden honky-tonk outpost and took up residence at the ultimate glossy status address: Vogue House, in Hanover Square.
It was the right move at the right moment. Yet the sale of Tatler to Condé Nast, however important for the magazine’s solidity, depressed our spirits. Gary Bogard had been the best owner anyone could wish for. Behind his reserve, he had a keen aesthetic sense, maverick business skills, a love of quality, and a love of me. The Tatler team had been ragtag renegades, flamethrowers at the black-tie balls. Now we were part of the establishment, lodged with all the other British Condé Nast publications and run by the ultimate Mayfair backslapper and man about town, Bernard Leser—a very different animal from Bogard, our beloved and clever outsider. My scrappy publisher, Tina Brooks, who had sold ads with furious upstart passion, was removed by Condé Nast in favor of a country squire wannabe in a tweed trilby hat who went fishing on weekends.
Within eighteen months of the new American ownership the core members of my team and I were getting bored. We felt we had slowed down. We heard little from the mighty American company that had bought us outside of occasional quick visits from its small, nervous chairman, S. I. Newhouse Jr.—known as Si—who would give me ten minutes when he came through London on art-buying trips. Oh, and we kept hearing about a big glamorous project in the works in New York: the relaunching of the company’s former flagship, Vanity Fair, whose heyday was the 1920s.
I felt the rise of envy at what such a magazine, reconceived, could be. To anyone who considered themselves, as I did, a magazine romantic, Vanity Fair represented the last word in literary prestige, social glamour, and visual ravishment. Flippant, knowing, and debonair, Vanity Fair’s voice—the most precious and elusive quality a magazine can offer its readers—was forged by its celebrated editor Frank Crowninshield, known to all as “Crownie,” whose appointment in 1914 was the inspired pick of Condé Montrose Nast (1872–1942), the dashing Casanova and publishing entrepreneur whose philosophy was “class not mass.”
In my twenties I was given a coffee-table book that collected Vanity Fair’s iconic portraits, and I lusted for the sophisticated New York it represented. Its pages shimmered with photographs by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, and George Hoyningen-Huene and glowed with rich color plates by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Covarrubias, and Rockwell Kent. The seductiveness of the images, the lapidary sheen of the prose in Crownie’s VF spoke to me like the rising strains of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. (I especially loved the wit of Crownie’s annual In and Out gallery, titled Hall of Fame, which nominated celebrities of the time for fame or oblivion.)
Like Keats and Shelley, Vanity Fair died young. By 1936, when Hitler marched into the Rhineland, the voice that had defined the magazine’s classic nonchalance had become its downfall. It was no longer the time for such airy contributions as a profile of Mahatma Gandhi titled “Lord of the Loin Cloth” or a picture of Mussolini next to a monkey, with the caption “In all of Italy / there’s no old meanie / who can make a monkey / of Mussolini.” To ride the zeitgeist successfully you have to know when it’s turned. A fast-paced new weekly titled The New Yorker, edited by the rough literary beast Harold Ross, had burst into bloom and was stealing Crownie’s best talent. Vanity Fair got skinnier and skinnier until Mr. Nast dealt it a hammer blow even more mortifying to Crownie than outright closure: he folded it into Vogue.
For almost half a century Vanity Fair had slept, immured in a magazine mausoleum. Then, as the 1980s got under way, Condé Nast Magazines—now part of the publishing conglomerate of a New Jersey newspaper family, the Newhouses—spurred by Si, decided to bring it back to life. Its rebirth was heralded by a blaze of marketing hype beyond anything the magazine world had ever seen.
Many would later argue that the excellence and ubiquity of that marketing campaign were bound to trip up the new Vanity Fair. All through 1982 the drumroll built ever more inflated expectations. Advertisements for the new Vanity Fair blazed from every major billboard. One showed the dancer Twyla Tharp leaping into the air over the single word “Breakthrough.” Another—perhaps the most notorious in the history of Vanity Fairmistakes—had a bare-chested John Irving, author of The World According to Garp, attired in red wrestling togs. The Irving image was splashed over the hubristic statement “No Contest,” followed by Vanity Fair’s logotype and the words “Coming in March 1983.”
At the time of Vanity Fair’s relaunch, Si Newhouse, fifty-six, and eight years into holding the reins of power he took from his father, had been on an acquisition and start-up tear. Short and nebbishy, he had a charmingly awkward persona that concealed a big ambition: to establish Condé Nast as the most prestigious magazine company in the world.
Within a year of his father’s death in 1979, Si, in rapid succession, bought the most important publishing house in America, Random House, whose imprints included Alfred A. Knopf, the prestige literary house; oversaw the successful start-up of a pioneering health and fitness magazine, Self; and bought and revamped Gentleman’s Quarterly, better known as GQ. And he was always on the lookout for more.
Si was the aesthete in the Newhouse family. He combined an eye for business opportunity with a passion for art, design, and high gloss. Intellectually insecure, he relied on the self-confident baron of taste and flair he had inherited from his father’s circle: Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s editorial director. Liberman—Russian-born, like Alexey Brodovitch, his brilliant rival at Carmel Snow’s Bazaar—was a well-known, if secondary, painter and sculptor, but he was revered for his panoptic control of every title at Condé Nast. He was everything that Si was not and wanted to be: a tall, slim, effortlessly cultured homme du monde with a small, elegant mustache and a poet’s swept-back mane of salt-and-pepper hair.
Alex became S. I. Newhouse Jr.’s mentor, introducing him to the world of art and fashion and café society over which he reigned with his stylish Russian wife, Tatiana, who made chic, much-copied hats for Saks. Alex was politically astute and, as an aficionado of turbulence, schooled in survival. His father, an economist and lumber specialist, had managed to be an adviser both to the tsar in prerevolutionary Russia and, afterward, to Lenin. Alex’s early life in St. Petersburg and Moscow was fraught with terror and violence. When Lenin died, the Libermans fled to Paris, where Alex first met Tatiana and helped the family’s stricken finances by working as a graphic artist and designer on the news magazine VU. They thrived there in the city’s fashionable creative milieu. Alex would later leverage his early connections there to take excellent pictures of the greatest artists of the school of Paris at work—Chagall, Picasso, Matisse. (The photographs were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 and published as a book that is still a classic, The Artist in His Studio.)
But it was the pace, glamour, and opportunity of Manhattan, where the family fled again in 1941 after the Nazis occupied Paris, that suited Alex best of all. He loved the self-invention of New York and, perhaps because he had so many painful memories, the American refusal to look back. He was swiftly hired for the design desk of Vogue, where he caught the ever-alert eye of Mr. Nast himself. He rose and rose after that to become, at Condé Nast Publications in 1962, “the tsar of all the Russias.”
Normally, the hiring (and firing) dynamic between Alex and Si worked uncannily well. Si loved quality, for sure, but only if it sold well. And Alex, though an artist by taste and temperament, knew how to protect and extend his power base. Yes, in the swinging sixties he had wooed Diana Vreeland away from Carmel Snow’s Bazaar and championed her throughout the eight creatively glorious years of her editorship of Vogue. But in the early seventies, when ads began to slide and the elitist irresponsibility of the previous decade was superseded by recession and earnest feminism, Alex readily agreed with Si that Vreeland had exceeded her sell-by date and it was time to deliver the coup de grâce. Her departing words were “Alex, we have all known many White Russians, and we’ve known a few Red Russians. But, Alex, you’re the only Yellow Russian I have ever known.”
The revival of Vanity Fair in 1983 was as much a passion project for Si as it was for Alex, but for different reasons. Si had long idolized a magazine that was not for sale: The New Yorker. Under its revered second editor, William Shawn, it had for thirty-five years been the jewel in the crown of American publishing—not only the highest-quality, the most influential, and the most admired of literary magazines but also the most successful. For two decades, the prosperity and prestige of The New Yorker had made the young Mr. Newhouse sigh.
But by 1982, The New Yorker was starting to lose ground, its readership aging every year. The cartoons were keeping it alive while the famously lengthy articles, unbroken by photographs or illustrations or display type, were moldering unread in the accumulating pile of issues in the wicker baskets by subscribers’ beds. To Si this looked like an opening. If he couldn’t have The New Yorker, maybe The New Yorker could be bested by a revived Vanity Fair. He looked around for a launch editor who had the cred to take it on, and Bob Gottlieb, his intellectual guru, whom he had picked to run Knopf, suggested Richard Locke, the nerdy, introverted deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review, known for his highbrow taste.
Alex, meanwhile, saw VF as an opportunity to burnish his own place at the intellectual high table. At Condé Nast his power base was Vogue, where he had the last word on everything. He dominated its editor in chief, Grace Mirabella, and her features editor, the gossipy sixty-nine-year-old culture baron, Leo Lerman, but he resented that he and his art were not taken seriously enough, trivialized, he believed, by his oversight of Vogue. Hiring Locke from the Gray Lady would be a step in the right direction.
As the new VF moved toward the deadline for its first issue, the prelaunch hype was building to a climax and premium ad pages were selling briskly. Granted, we in London occasionally heard rumors of editorial chaos from friends at Condé Nast in New York. Manuscripts and proposals were piling up unread; some talented staffers had been hired, but few had any experience with what it takes to put out a glossy commercial magazine; Locke himself seemed paralyzed with indecision. Of course, any start-up, especially one on the scale of the new VF, tends to be a scene of frenzy and conflict. But the truth is that the competing visions—of the marketing department, of Si and Alex, of Richard Locke—never came into alignment. All they had in common was that they were derivative of something better.
Which brings us to a fateful, rainy afternoon in early February of 1983.
A heavy envelope arrived at the offices of Tatler on the fourth floor of Vogue House. It bore a New York postmark and contained the freshly minted, still unreleased, eagerly awaited first issue of American Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair.
I summoned Miles, Michael, Gabé, and Sarah to page through it with me, expecting to revel in wonders that would raise our own editorial game. But as we looked at it in silence, we were, as Brits like to say, gobsmacked. VF’s editors had a free hand to hire anyone in the world—any writer, any photographer, any designer. And this is what they’d done with such largesse? This flatulent, pretentious, chaotic catalog of dreary litterateurs in impenetrable typefaces? A forty-page safari through a new Gabriel Márquez novel? When the first issue broke, the scorn of the response was unanimous. Time, The New York Times, and the New Republic all put the boot in. The New Republic’s acerbic Brit, Henry Fairlie, nominated the twelve-page Ralph Lauren ad spread as the only appealing feature he could find. Everyone trashed the cacophony of the graphics.
The entire management of Condé Nast Magazines was mortified. A party at Newhouse’s home for the staff to celebrate the publication was over and done within thirty minutes. Richard Locke went into what the staff called “bunker” mode, cowering in his office. Liberman feared that this failure could be pinned on the editorial director—i.e., himself—and started looking for a new editor to clean up fast.
Meanwhile, in London I had grown increasingly restless at Tatler. In one of those reckless, abrupt moves I seem to be prone to making, I sent UK Condé Nast managing director Bernard Leser and Si Newhouse my letter of resignation.
My husband was also now free. In 1981 Rupert Murdoch acquired Times newspapers from the Thomson organization. Unwisely, Harry left his successful power base at The Sunday Times, run as an entirely separate newspaper, to edit its august but ailing sister paper, The Times. He was soon in a noisy showdown with the new owner. On acquisition, Murdoch had made five promises to The Times board and the British government to respect the historic political and editorial independence of The Times. Within twelve months he had broken every one. In 1982 Harry earned twin journalistic distinctions: Britain’s Granada Television voted him editor of the year, and Murdoch fired him.
In the meantime, my parents had left England, too, decamping to their house in the south of Spain to enjoy the bougainvillea.
Harry started considering invitations to teach from US universities. I’d been feeling the lure of America for some time. I loved our London life together but I knew that if he was willing, I would give it all up in a heartbeat to live in New York City. The year after graduation from Oxford I had spent a thrilling three-month sojourn there, freelancing from a death therapist’s sublet in Chelsea. (I wrote a play about the experience, Happy Yellow, that was produced at the London Fringe in April 1977.) I wanted to go back to Manhattan—and conquer it. New York was the big time, the wider world, the white-hot center, and that’s where I, a girl of the arena, wanted to be.
One evening in the spring of 1983, a call for me came through from the United States to our Ponsonby Terrace refuge. It was from Alexander Liberman. I had met this famous corporate charmer only briefly, the year before, on a visit to New York with Michael Roberts for the American fashion collections. Why was Mr. Liberman calling me now?
The strains of Gershwin’s clarinet again began to rise in my head. A tortured, perilous courtship for the editorship of Vanity Fair was about to begin.
Copyright © 2017 by Tina Brown.
