Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“Tina Brown is a modern Becky Sharp – bouncy, ambitious, calculating and ruthless: That’s Roger Louis, The Times of London. I don’t know how you get The New Yorker and The New York Times to rave, but you did,” said Tammy Haddad when introducing Tina at The Jefferson Hotel in honor of her new book The Vanity Fair Diaries. “The Diary is the perfect stocking filler for any social x-ray and for anyone who yearns to wallow in nostalgia. But even students of our time will find the presence of Brown’s observations a source of amusement. The decade’s greatest symbol she observes, turns out to be not a person but a building, Trump Tower. Okay, we have to start there.”
Tammy Haddad and Tina Brown
Book synopsis: “Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood. The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 – 1992 is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Condé Nast’s troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet’s slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company. She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding. In the face of rampant skepticism, she triumphantly reinvents a failing magazine. Here are the inside stories of Vanity Fair scoops and covers that sold millions―the Reagan kiss, the meltdown of Princess Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles, the sensational Annie Leibovitz cover of a gloriously pregnant, naked Demi Moore. In the diary’s cinematic pages, the drama, the comedy, and the struggle of running an “it” magazine come to life. Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries is also a woman’s journey, of making a home in a new country and of the deep bonds with her husband, their prematurely born son, and their daughter. Astute, open-hearted, often riotously funny, Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries is a compulsively fascinating and intimate chronicle of a woman’s life in a glittering era.” Publisher
John Coale and Carol Melton
“Let’s start with the fact that you made all of us in this room cool. You were the first national editor whose job it was to pick what’s the most culturally interesting, not what’s newsy, but what’s interesting, and you looked at Washington and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s all of them.’ So on behalf of everyone here,” added Haddad, “let’s say thank you.”
Tina took on Vanity Fair when Reagan was on a glide path to reelection. “I recall that night when Reagan beat Mondale, who I said should’ve been a Prime Minister of Norway,” Brown joked. “We had Marie Brenner planted in Georgetown that night at Evangeline Bruce’s house and it was all what you call the Make the World Better-ites all shaking their heads and saying, ‘Oh, an actor is again in the White House. It’s just horrible. The world’s ending.’ What is funny in the diaries is that Donald Trump is there throughout, like a kind of recurring, dare I say it, virus. He keeps coming back in the pages. When I first met him in ’87, I liked him a lot. He came across to me as this kind of brash, funny, outrageous man shouting across the table at me like ‘Hey Tina! I’m on the cover of Newsweek and what do you think of that? Newsweek’s better than Time.’ He says, ‘What’s better? Newsweek or Time?’ I said, ‘Well, Time, actually.’ So it was kind of funny to see him in that sort of infancy of his sort of celebrity in a sense and how it changed over the years.”
Tammy Haddad and Tina Brown
Tina’s big break came though when she sat in to host The Today Show when she was editor of Tablet in the UK. “I had these huge kind of Camilla Parker Bowles waves, you know, and I was sitting there with Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley. That was such a moment. You know, the idea of being co-anchor of The Today Show with those guys at the royal wedding, it was the big moment for Tablet. It was actually right after that we sold Tablet to Conde Nast. We sort of cashed in on the royal wedding and then Conde Nast brought me to America to work for Vanity Fair and so S.I. Newhouse, who just died just a few weeks back actually, brought me to the U.S. and I worked with him for 17 years after that. Understand I was just out of my 20’s when I got to Vanity Fair. They had two editors that had failed and I think that when you’ve got nothing to lose and you’re young, you just don’t even sort of look down from the high wire. And there was no time. I mean, we just had to put out an issue and the best spot I had really was those first months when I didn’t really know anybody. We had to go into the art department and I just tore the whole magazine apart and redesigned it and ransacked the art department drawers and there was an unpublished portfolio by Annie Leibovitz of comedians, including that wonderful picture which became iconic of Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk. And I went crazy. I said we have to put this in the magazine and I gave it 10 pages, called it ‘April Fools’ because it was the April issue. It was just tremendous fun, really. Just sort of having this immense playground suddenly, where there was nothing to lose and doing it at warp speed.”
Whoopi Goldberg 1984 Vanity Fair Cover Photo by Annie Liebowitz
Then there was the cover of the Reagans. They were not young people, but they looked sexy. “The Reagans was the cover that sort of turned our fortunes around because for the first year and a half, you know, we struggled,” Tina told us. “Although the magazine was improving, the advertising wasn’t there. We needed a hit cover. And we got this scoop, you know, we got to interview and photograph the Reagans. And I took with me to the White House Harry Benson who is of course one of the great photographers of presidents. Harry is this excitable Scotsman who just sort of jumps up and down and makes a lot of noises. And he came and brought a Boombox with him with a tape of Frank Sinatra singing Nancy with the Laughing Face. And he unrolled this white screen and he said we are going to put it up here and when they come in we’re going to play the tape. And they were on their way to dinner with the President of Argentina and they arrived in their black tie outfits. As soon as they come through the door, Harry gets the Boombox and Nancy literally goes, ‘Ronnie, that’s our song’ and they start doing this foxtrot together with Harry jumping up and down like a kind of excitable gnome. You know, going like, ‘Give your wife a kiss, Mr. President! Give your wife a kiss!’ And snap, snap, snap! And Reagan does, of course. Ronnie, he does then lean into Nancy and they do this incredible screen kiss which is the photograph inside, which we call ‘The Reagan Kiss.’ And I do think that in a funny way we caught something that was important about the Reagan White House, which was how transformed he is by her. You can see it in his eyes. And how she is … as I put it, his joy gene. And that they had this ability to kind of collude with the national mood. ….. that they understood what America needed to see and what America needed to see was a couple in love, dancing. And they did help to transform the mood of America by this kind of iconography. So, they were brilliant that way. I mean that was the great talent for either Reagan and I think in the end, that was the defining thing about the presidency was them as a couple.”
Photo credit: Harry Benson
When Tina moved on to The New Yorker, she was a bit intimidated at the beginning. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to do The New Yorker. It took two years in fact for S.I. to kind of really persuade me to do it. He kept coming at me and I kept backing off. I didn’t have the same emotional connection with The New Yorker at first. So I went back to the libraries and I looked at the old copies of The New Yorker in the 20’s and then I found a connection. I thought, I want to do The New Yorker of the Harold Ross era of the 20’s because that was the magazine that spoke to me the most. It was much more visual. It had much more of a pulse. You know, it had full page cartoons by Peter Arno and Charles Adams. The covers were much more topical, much more relevant. And there was kind of a short and long flavor to the pieces. That was much more of a kind of amusing mix, actually. And I thought, that’s the magazine that I want to do. So I took over and redesigned it just like I did Vanity Fair, over again, over a long summer working to sort out different kinds of redesign. I mean it wasn’t a big, flashy redesign. It was really about tuning it all the way through and restoring that feeling of the 20’s that I loved, and adding photography which they haven’t had. I brought on Richard Avedon and kept changing the covers and using people like Art Spiegelman and so on to do these wonderful sort of more topically-flavored covers. And then I brought in 50 new writers including David Remnick, Jeff Toobin, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, Ken Auletta, all of these terrific writers who are all doing wonderful work today.”
Rachael Pearson, David Adler and Tina Brown
She left The New Yorker to go work with Harvey Weinstein, not her greatest career move. But Talk Magazine was such a good move for her. Apparently though, Weinstein didn’t understand publishing actually. But for all the appalling-ness, and there was a lot, of working with Harvey, she also learned quite a lot from him. He was the arch-marketer of all time. He really knew how to get behind something and bully the rest of the world into paying attention. “Unfortunately, the world is paying attention now in ways he never had in mind,” Brown lamented. “The thing is that the answer to creepy men is to kind of be the boss, right? I mean, I was an editor in chief for nearly 25 years, so he didn’t really hassle me too much because I had kind of defined my own role. That is the only answer that I have. The more women in power, the more women are leading; the more women on that team, the less creepy, stalking sort of harassers you’re going to encounter. And so, that was not my issue, actually. I’ve been hassled in other ways in terms of feeling like so many women feel, kind of cut out of the action that I wanted to be in or, you know, underestimated or demeaned or whatever. I mean I’ve had a lot of that in my career.”
Former Rep. Jane Harmon and Tina Brown
The Vanity Fair Diaries are also a love affair to her career. “It’s about the joy of professionalism in many ways of being ambitious, exhilarated and the love of making pages, which I have a passion for. I don’t think the future is with magazines, clearly; but I don’t really care so much as long as great journalism is funded – that’s all I care about. If they read it on headphones, I don’t care. If they read it on loofahs, I don’t care, as long as its paid for. As long as you can get people to get great journalism funded. I was able to do that because it was a self-confident, well-funded era. I was able to pay writers properly and they did excellent work because they had the time to do it. I feel its very celebratory of an era and of an art form, which I think magazine making is. So that makes me feel good because it is always being trashed and I wanted to show what fun it was, how collaborative it was. And also, it’s somewhat of a kind of elegy really for a world which was a passionately creative time. So, I want to celebrate that and I think that makes me happy to be able to do that in the book.”
Rachael Pearson, Kathy O’Hearn, Hilary Rosen, Tina Brown, Carol Melton, Kate McKinnon and Tammy Haddad
With that the co-hosts Connie Milstein, Rachel Pearson, Tammy Haddad, Carol Melton, Andrea Mitchel, Hilary Rosen, Kathy O’Hearn and Gail McKinnon toasted the author and all the journalists in the room.
Here, here!
