Tina Brown

It's 1983. A young Englishwoman arrives in Manhattan on a mission. Summoned in the hope that she can save Condé Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is plunged into the maelstrom of competitive New York media. She survives the politics and the intrigue by a simple stratagem: succeeding. Here are the inside stories of the 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. Written with dash and verve, the diary is also a sharply observed account of New York and London society. In its cinematic pages the drama, comedy and struggle of raising a family and running an 'it' magazine come to life.

The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983–1992

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 over- refined 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.

Then I suddenly realized he was wooing me to join the Lauder company. He mentioned “heading up their British branch” or suggesting to them a company they might buy and I could run. “If, for example, Burberry were to be on sale, we'd be interested in that,” he said. I was incredulous. I am a journalist. I wouldn't have a clue about how to run a chain of shops that specializes in raincoats. In America, success in one field seems to make people think you can do anything. Maybe I will be offered a job as a brain surgeon next.

New York women are so much more confident than we are in London. They really are ahead of us in what they expect, what they assume, what they aspire to do. They seem so much better on their feet and in meetings. American girls' schools, I think, are much better at teaching girls how to speak in public and handle themselves in a public setting. I am terrified of speaking in public, still. I agonize too much. I dread it when American hosts and hostesses bang the glass and start going round the table soliciting instant insights, the way they do. I always feel as if I am dreading the teacher coming to me next and yet when others are talking I often think—I had something so much better I could have offered up. So why didn't I?

“You must write now, about all this.” He gestured around the room. The natural editor. Still recruiting. If he was running a magazine now I would work for him in a heartbeat!

He seems to me such a natural writer. You can teach people structure and how to write a lead. But you can't teach them how to notice the right things. I just hope he gets it on the page, or we can interview it out of him.

I dressed very English in a long-sleeved navy silk Saint Laurent shirt with a white collar and a navy skirt with oyster stockings and low-heeled pumps. I was going to drop the flirtatious charm of La Grenouille, however, and become, as Gloria Steinem put it so well, the man you want to marry.

The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983–1992 quotes

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