When I recently picked up The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992 by Tina Brown I was prepared for a fabulous stroll down memory lane. Tina did not disappoint for the most part, but one shocking (to me, anyway) revelation literally made me drop my Kindle.
Of course, I anticipated some major name-dropping and gossip from the decadent, over-the-top 80s when both Tina and I were editors in New York City: she, the fabulously talented, visionary editor who turned around Vanity Fair, a dying up-market glossy; me, the managing editor of a supermarket tabloid, STAR magazine, shunned by the same celebrities who fell over themselves to be on Tina’s Vanity Fair covers.
I am sure Tina never read STAR magazine, other than glancing at the cover at the supermarket checkout. I, on the other hand, was an avid reader of her revamped Vanity Fair .
Diaries of A New York Editor
I was progressing nicely with the Diaries. Tina writes about going to the White House for a photo shoot with the Reagans who pose for photos which today would have gone “viral.” They’re smooching and dancing with Nancy kicking up her heels. She writes about taking time out from being an “editor” to fly to London to report on Princess Di and the state of her marriage to Prince Charles.
She also faithfully chronicles the impact AIDS had on the creative community, and on the loss of many of her friends and colleagues. On the personal side, Tina writes about her efforts with husband Sir Harold Evans (a former editor of The Sunday Times in London) to buy a weekend/vacation house in Quogue, in the Hamptons — and to have a baby.
Juanita Who?
Then I came to her entry for March 11, 1986 — two months after the premature birth of her son George, whom she refers to as “G”, and for whom she hired a nanny, Juanita, ” a very quiet, kind and efficient Filipina.”
She writes: “Sunday, I had a row with Juanita. I can’t stand the way she always, always tells me I am doing something wrong when I am with G […] I told her to back off and she then went and cried for two hours in the bathroom. Then I heard her listening to tapes of the last baby she worked with screaming and babbling, probably as some kind of consolation, but it also felt weird and creepy.”
OMG! “Listening to tapes of the last baby she worked with screaming and babbling!” Really? I want to shout: “Run. Grab Georgie! Get out of the house! Don’t look back!” But, it’s another eight months before this entry on November 3, 1986 when she writes about coming home early to hear Juanita on the phone saying: “I hate her. Georgie hates her. He loves me.” Tina tells the nanny to pack her bags, but adds: “I called the doorman [to wait while she packed.] I didn’t want a nail file between my eyes.”
Having It All?
I am horrified that it took Tina so long to fire this woman. Especially since this week, while reading the Diaries, I’m also consuming the graphic, daily newspaper coverage of the trial of a nanny who butchered two beautiful tots on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and left them to bleed to death in a bathtub as she tried to slit her own throat.
Of course, in all fairness, it must be noted that back then (Tina Brown’s son George was born in 1986, mine was born in 1988) we’d never heard of anything so horrendous; we were just trying to keep it all together to prove that we could have it all: be power women by day, wives and mommies by night — and brilliant at all three.
Tina Brown covers it all –editorial challenges, office politics and personal joys and heartbreaks– in this delicious, nostalgic read. Her honesty, however, exposes the fact that her life which looked so sophisticated and glamorous was not the fairytale it appeared. In addition to doing her job to revive VF, and being wife and mother, part of Tina’s job was to be seen around town at breakfasts, and at over-the-top parties and dinners of the rich and famous. She moves in circles with Wall Street powerhouses like John Gutfreund, and Saul Steinberg , and fashion designers, Bill Blass, Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta whom she has to constantly schmooze to get advertising pages.
Doshing Up
She shares a hair stylist, Louis Licari, with Anna Wintour, the renowned editor of Vogue. One afternoon they arrive at the salon at the same time: “Anna was having her bob minked. I was having my streaks bleached,” she writes. She attends the over-the-top wedding of Laura Tisch and Jonathan Steinberg, and the over-the-top funeral of Malcolm Forbes. These are names and faces, movers and shakers that aren’t necessarily widely known outside of New York and Los Angeles, but who were recognized as the elites of the day.
On Sept 15, 1986 she writes: “My eyes burn with the stress of the day that begins at six, doing crunches with the thunder-thighed trainer followed by an hour with G, an hour blowing out hair and getting dressed for the office, and then its race, race, race to get through the day and home by five to walk G in his stroller and play with him, then on to his bath time and dosh up (dress up) for one of the innumerable place-card dinners.”
In March 1989 she “felt the burden of relentless good mummy-dom and ached to be reading my Doctorow novel.”
In November 1989 “I had to spend an hour getting [Georgie] back to sleep. I felt like throwing myself out the window. I just need three months of freedom.”
Hand Job For A Horse
As the socializing appears to wear thin, she writes about Alice Mason, a New York icon who gathered the shiniest New Yorkers to her apartment for her legendary, monthly dinner parties, but apparently served the worst food, ever: “I now realize that the heinous dinner of tumescent gray sausage, sauerkraut and Irish coffee is the only meal one will receive in her house.
On sitting next to Clint Eastwood at a dinner: “he’s quiet, watchful, instinctive. Also hard work. Long taciturn silences. A kind of heavy chivalry, calling me Ma’am. Said nothing memorable. How could one be bored after one course with the world’s biggest heartthrob? I was.”
After going to dinner on the opening night of the New York Film Festival in 1990 with writer Joan Didion and her husband John Dunne, she writes: “I longed to be eating a baked potato in Quogue.”
And, then this gem after flying to Paris for yet another party: she returns to her hotel with fashion photographer Helmut Newton and his wife to look at some photo spreads for Helmut’s new art-house (read “porn”) magazine which Helmut’s wife calls “good clean fun.” To which Tina’s silent response is: “Good clean fun is not what I would say about a beau monde woman giving a hand job to a sexually aroused horse, but never mind.”
Bad Boss
Her boss, billionaire Si Newhouse is no prize, either, it seems. Tina writes that when he summons her, she never knows if he’s going to give her a raise, or fire her. By this time, while she’s been editor of VF, he has fired Grace Mirabella after 30 years of her service as editor of Vogue. He then summarily fires the president of his publishing company, Random House, after 22 years of service.
“Si is a constant instigator of staff musical chairs.” she writes. And, after Rupert Murdoch (my old boss) hires Grace Mirabella to launch the fashion magazine, Mirabella, Tina applauds even though she despises Murdoch for firing her husband from The Sunday Times. She writes : “It’s good for Si to understand that firing people boorishly does have business as well as social implications. The launch of Mirabella is a delicious Judith Krantz touch in a media soap opera.”
Trump: Sneaky Petulant Infant
What diary or account of New York City in the 80s could be complete without reference to Donald Trump, who was a solid fixture on the social circuit back then with first wife Ivana ?
Tina Brown writes after reading a manuscript of The Art of the Deal in 1987 “It feels when you have finished it, as if you’ve been nose to nose with an entertaining conman, and I suspect the American public will like nothing better.”
And, after VF writer, Marie Brenner turns in a feature on Donald and Ivana Trump, Tina notes that “Ivana [is] upgraded to superstar victim of a brutish, philandering husband.
“Marie has been able to establish such a pattern of lying and loudmouthing in Trump that it’s incredible he still prospers and gets banks to loan him money. The revelation that he has a collection of Hitler’s speeches at the office is going to make a lot of news.”
A year later, Marie Brenner got doused with white wine thrown down her back by Trump at a black-tie gala at Tavern on the Green. Writes Tina Brown: “The sneaky petulant infant was clearly still stewing about [Marie’s] takedown in VF […] What a coward! He couldn’t even confront her to her face!
My Second Novel was Inspired by VF Article
In the interests of full disclosure I should add that an article by Marie Brenner in 1991 gave me the idea for my thriller, Delusion which was published in 1997.
The VF article was titled Erotomania, and was about a woman who believed that she was having an affair with a famous New York surgeon whom she stalked for years. The article was also the basis for a Lifetime TV movie, Obsessed.
Historical Note: In 1988 when Vanity Fair had a monthly circulation of 429,000 paid subscriptions and newstand sales of approx. 195,000, Star Magazine was selling 3.5 MILLION copies WEEKLY, almost all of those at newstands and checkouts !!!