Vanity Fair Diaries (Brown)

The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992
Tina Brown, 2017
Henry, Holt & Company
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627791366


Summary
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 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 Conde Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina 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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 21. 1953
• Where—Maidenhead, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Tina Brown CBE (Christina Hambley Brown) is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author. Born a British citizen, she took United States citizenship in 2005 after emigrating in 1984 to edit Vanity Fair. She is legally titled Lady Evans.

In 2000 Brown was appointed a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her services to overseas journalism, and in 2007 was inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. As an editor, she has also been honored with four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club awards, and ten National Magazine Awards.

Family
Tina Brown was born in Maidenhead, England, and she and her elder brother, Christopher Hambley Brown (who became a movie producer) grew up in Little Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, a Thames village in the countryside west of London. Her father, George Hambley Brown, was active in the British film industry producing the early Miss Marple films in the series starring Margaret Rutherford, based on the character created by Agatha Christie.

Her mother, Bettina Iris Mary (Kohr), was an assistant to Laurence Olivier. Brown's mother was of part Iraqi descent. As Brown recounted, “She was dark and I never knew why.” In her later years, Bettina wrote for an English-language magazine for expatriates in Spain where she and her husband lived in retirement until moving to New York in the early 1980s to be with their daughter and grandchildren.

Education
In Brown's own words she was considered "an extremely subversive influence" as a child, which resulted in her expulsion from three boarding schools. Offenses included organizing a demonstration to protest against the school's policy of allowing a change of underwear only three times a week, referring to her headmistress' bosoms as "unidentified flying objects" in a journal entry, and writing a play about her school being blown up and a public lavatory being erected in its place.

When she was 17, Brown entered St. Anne's College at the University of Oxford. Studying English literature, she also wrote for Isis, the university's literary magazine, contributing interviews with the journalist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore. Her sharp, witty prose led to her some of her work being published by the New Statesman while still an undergraduate.

Her friendship with Waugh served as a boost to her writing career, and he used his influence to draw attention to her talent. Later, she went on to date the writer Martin Amis. Still at Oxford, she won the Sunday Times National Student Drama Award for her one-act play "Under the Bamboo Tree." A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, in 1977 was mounted at the London fringe Bush Theatre and later performed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Personal life
In 1973, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh introduced Brown's writings to Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, and in 1974 she was given freelance assignments in both the UK and US. When a relationship developed between Brown and Evans (who was married at the time), she resigned to write for a rival newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph.

Evans divorced his first wife in 1978, and in 1981 he and Brown married at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton, New York, home of then the Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. Brown lives in New York City with Sir Harold Evans (knighted in 2004) and their two children, a son, George, born in 1986 and a daughter, Isabel, born in 1990.

Career - Tatler
While doing freelance reporting after graduation, Brown was invited to write a weekly column by the literary humor magazine, Punch. These articles and her freelance contributions to the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph earned her the Catherine Pakenham Award for the best journalist under 25. Some of the writings from this era formed part of her first collection Loose Talk, published in 1979.

Also in 1979, when she was 25, Brown was invited by the Australian real estate millionaire Gary Bogard to edit his newly purchased magazine, Tatler. Brown transformed what was then a tiny, almost extinct, society magazine into a modern glossy magazine featuring covers by celebrated photographers. Tatler pulled in top writers from Brown's eclectic circle including Julian Barnes, Dennis Potter, Auberon Waugh, Brian Sewell, Georgina Howell, and Nicholas Coleridge (later President of Conde Nast International).

Brown herself wrote content for every issue, contributing irreverent surveys of the upper classes. She traveled through Scotland to portray the owners' stately homes. She also wrote short satirical profiles of eligible London bachelors under the pen-name Rosie Boot. Tatler covered the emergence of Lady Diana Spencer, soon to become known as Diana, Princess of Wales. On July 29, 1981, the day of the royal wedding, Brown joined NBC's Tom Brokaw in running commentary for The Today Show. Tatler sales jumped from 10,000 to 40,000.

In 1982 when S. I. Newhouse Jr., owner of Conde Nast Publications, bought Tatler, Brown resigned to become a full-time writer again. The break didn't last long, and Brown was lured back to Conde Nast. That year she also hosted several editions of the long running television series Film82 for BBC1 as a guest presenter.

Vanity Fair
In 1983, Brown was brought to New York by Newhouse to advise on Vanity Fair, the fabled style magazine that had ceased publication in 1936. Newhouse had resurrected it earlier that year, but it was failing — with its anemic circulation of only 200,000 and a mere 12 pages of advertising. Brown stayed on as a contributing editor and then was named editor-in-chief in January, 1984. Her words on taking it over?  — "Pretentious, humorless. It wasn't too clever, it was just dull."

The first contract writer she hired was not a writer but a movie producer whom she met at a dinner party hosted by the writer Marie Brenner. The producer told her he was going to California for the trial of the strangler of his daughter. To aid him through his grief, Brown suggested that he keep a diary. The result became a report published in Vanity Fair under the headline "Justice." The article launched the long, and luminous, magazine career of Dominick Dunne.

Early stories like "Justice," as well as the magazine's new, livelier covers, brightened the prospects of Vanity Fair. Brown signed up other top writers, and the magazine became a mix of celebrity and serious foreign and domestic reporting.

Brown persuaded the novelist William Styron to write about his depression under the title "Darkness Visible," which subsequently became a best-selling nonfiction book. At the same time she formed fruitful relationships with photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose portrayals of Jerry Hall, Diane Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg and others came to define Vanity Fair. Its most famous cover was August 1991's of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore.

Three stories appeared in Vanity Fair: Harry Benson's cover shoot of Ronald and Nancy Reagan dancing in the White House; Helmut Newton's notorious portrait of accused murderer Claus von Bulow in his leathers with his mistress Andrea Reynolds (reported by Dominick Dunne), and Brown's own cover story on Princess Diana in October 1985 titled, "The Mouse that Roared," which broke the news of the fracture in the royal marriage. Those three stories from June to October, 1985, saved the magazine at end of a year rife with rumor that it would be folded into The New Yorker, another recent acquisition by Newhouse.

Sales of Vanity Fair rose from 200,000 to 1.2 million. Advertising topped 1,440 pages in 1991 with circulation revenues at $20 million. The magazine sold some 55 percent of its (highly profitable) newsstand issues, well above the industry average. Under Brown's editorship Vanity Fair won four National Magazine Awards, including a 1989 award for General Excellence. In 1988, Brown herself was named Magazine Editor of the Year by Advertising Age magazine.

The New Yorker
In 1992, Brown accepted the Newhouse company's invitation to become editor of The New Yorker, only the fourth editor in its entire 73-year history — succeeding legends Harold Ross, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieband. She was, of course, the first female to hold the position. Before taking the helm, Brown said she immersed herself in vintage editions, especially those issued under founding editor Harold Ross:

There was an irreverence, a lightness of touch, as well as a literary voice, that had been obscured in later years when the magazine became more celebrated and stuffy.… Rekindling that DNA became my passion.

Anxieties that Brown might change the identity of The New Yorker as a cultural institution prompted a number of resignations. George Trow, who had been with the magazine for almost three decades, accused Brown of "kissing the ass of celebrity" in his resignation letter. (To which Brown reportedly replied, "I am distraught at your defection but since you never actually write anything I should say I am notionally distraught.") The departing Jamaica Kincaid described Brown as "a bully" and "Stalin in high heels."

But Brown had the support of some New Yorker stalwarts, including John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill, Lillian Ross, Calvin Tomkins, Janet Malcolm, Harold Brodkey and Philip Hamburger, as well as newer staffers like Adam Gopnik and Nancy Franklin. During her editorship she let 79 staffers go and engaged 50 new writers and editors, most of whom remain to this day, including David Remnick (whom she nominated as her successor), Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, Hendrik Hertzberg. Brown introduced the concept of special double issues such as the annual fiction issue and the Holiday Season cartoon issue. She also cooperated with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to devote a whole issue to the theme Black in America.

In 1992, Brown broke the magazine's longstanding taboo against serious photography by inviting Richard Avedon to be its first staff photographer. She also approved controversial covers from a new crop of artists, including Edward Sorel's October, 1992, cover that had people buzzing about the meaning of a punk rock passenger sprawled in the backseat of an elegant horse-drawn carriage: was it Brown's self-mocking riposte to fears she would downgrade the magazine?

A year later a national controversy was provoked by Brown's publication of Art Spiegelman's Valentine's Day cover of a Jewish man and a black woman in an embracing kiss, a comment on the mounting racial tensions between blacks and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York.

During Brown's tenure, the magazine was honored with 4 George Polk Awards, 5 Overseas Press Club Awards, and 10 National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Newsstand sales rose 145 percent, and its circulation increased to 807,935 for the second half of 1997, up from 658,916 during the corresponding period in 1992. Critics maintained it was hemorrhaging money, but Newhouse remained supportive, viewing the magazine under Brown as a start-up (which routinely lose money):

It was practically a new magazine. She added topicality, photography, color. She did what we would have done if we invented The New Yorker from scratch. To do all that was costly. We knew it would be.

Under Brown's leadership, its economic fortunes improved every year: in 1995 losses were about $17 million, in 1996 $14 million, and in 1997 $11 million.

In 1998, Brown resigned from The New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (then owned by the Disney Company) to be the chairman of a new multi-media company they intended to start with a new magazine, a book company and a television show. The Hearst company came in as partners with Miramax.

The verdicts following Brown's New Yorker departure included:

She had to move fast. She was decisive … went against the tradition of popular culture unfriendly to the written word. And what was she doing? She was pumping energy and life into a magazine devoted to publishing aesthetically and intellectually demanding writing. She saved The New Yorker. – Hendrik Hertzberg (editorial director)

The magazine will remain smarter and braver — more open to argument, and incomparably less timid — for her presence here. – Adam Gopnik (writer)

I assume we can now look forward to Miramax becoming a shallow, celebrity obsessed money loser she made The New Yorker. – Randy Cohen (writer)

She is the best magazine editor alive. What more can I say? – Michael Kinsley (writer)

The most important thing, I think, has been [Brown's] effort to bring together the intellectual material and the streets. When she was in charge, despite all the complaints from the old New Yorker crowd, one got a much stronger sense of the variousness of American society than one did under the editorship of perhaps the rightfully sainted Mr. Shawn. – Stanley Crouch (writer)

Talk and The Daily Beast
After Talk magazine and Talk Media and a stint at CNBC, Brown partnered with Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, in October, 2008, to found and edit the online site, The Daily Beast. Two years later, in November 2010, The Daily Beast merged with the American weekly news magazine Newsweek in a joint venture to form The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. In September 2013, Brown announced she would be leaving her position as editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast to launch Tina Brown Media.

Books
Brown published The Diana Chronicles in 2007, a decade after the Princess's death. The Vanity Fair Diaries came out in 2017. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/11/2017.)

Book Reviews
A mile a minute memoir I read like a parrot with my nails embedded in Pirate Tina’s shoulder — yelling "what??!!’ ‘What!?!! WOWZA!" as she swashbuckles through the eighties, her sword slicing up the staid shibboleths of NY society. I remembered why I was afraid of her in those days. And why that energy & imagination, turned to making the world better, has galvanized so many of us now. A cultural catalyst — she makes things happen. Thank god she wrote it all down. Hang on. A wild ride.
Meryl Streep


Full of creative glee, passion and excitement, The Vanity Fair Diaries features a cast of characters like Mad Men (and women) on speed; an epic of a legendary magazine’s dazzling re-creation; moments of laugh-out-loud comic asides, juicy gossip and sketches of Austen-like sharpness, all put together by an editor of high octane genius who pauses only to reflect that however good she might be, it’s never quite good enough. Oh yes, it is. Read the diaries and feel better about everything. The word lives!
Simon Schama


High, low, smart, sexy, Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries is like the magazine she re-invented, a must read for anyone interested in Hollywood, high-society, and the movers and shakers of pop culture.
Anderson Cooper

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