Tina Brown and Vanity Fair staffers review the latest layout of an upcoming editon.
Photo Credit: Tina Brown
What do you remember about the 1980s?
The decade that ushered in Ronald Reagan and his vision of a shining “city on a hill”; the Cinderella story of an assistant nursery school teacher, Diana Frances Spencer, landing her Prince Charming (or, so she thought) when she pledged her troth to Charles, Prince of Wales; Dynasty star, Joan Collins (Alexis Colby) and her signature puff shoulder dresses; Michael Jackson, ascending to the throne as the “King of Pop;” and corporate greed leading to the collapse of a number of prominent financiers, including Michael Milken, Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky and Martin Siegel for racketeering and trading with inside information.
Harvard Business Review, in fact, labeled the 1980s, the “Decade of Greed.”
Tina Brown, award-winning journalist, author, former magazine editor, and founder of Women in the World Summit, takes us back to the glitter and glam of the affluent 1980s, in “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992.”
Brown contextualized her personal diaries, from the time she arrived in New York City in 1983 as an advisor to Vanity Fair Magazine, quickly replacing Leo Lerman as editor in chief in 1984, and assuming editorial control of a magazine that she considered "pretentious, humorless, not a bit clever…just dull.”
Vanity Fair was also losing money in buckets.
Condé Nast Publications, under the ownership of Samuel "S.I." Newhouse Jr., forked over $50 million to acquire the popular culture and fashion magazine in 1981.
The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936.
The Oxford educated Tina Brown, of course, the “Wunderkind of British Magazines,” as she was known, earned her journalistic chops back in London, becoming the top editor at the Tatler, a fashion and lifestyle magazine, when she was only 25, turning it into a trendy magazine for urban professionals (“Sloane Rangers”), making it edgy, dazzling, and boosting circulation from 10,000 to 40,000.
Brown stormed into her Vanity Fair job with a Category Five Hurricane bravado, replacing a number of staff members, (with pools of “blood on the floors”) while a few, the lucky few, were shipped off to other Condé Nast Publications. What Brown wanted was not stuffy, bookish, intellectual pieces, but the marriage of celebrities with cutting edge, politically engaged journalism that carried some bite, capturing the cultural zeitgeist, mirroring, in a sense, the success of Don Hewitt’s CBS’ 60 Minutes with its high-lo balance.
Brown’s first issue of Vanity Fair as editor was in April, 1984, featuring a new up and coming actress, Daryl Hannah, splashed on its cover with the headline: “Blonde Ambition.”
Many of the most eye turning Vanity Fair cover shoots under Brown’s stewardship were Annie Leibovitz masterpieces, including, “Jerry Hall Tells All” (March, 1985 issue), Cher (May, 1986 issue), Michael Jackson, "Hall of Fame" (December, 1989 issue), and arguably the most talked about VF cover of all time, a pregnant Demi Moore, fully exposed (August, 1991 issue), "More Demi Moore" The Demi Moore issue, by the way, sold a staggering 548,058 newsstand copies.
Brown spared no expense in recruiting some of the most talented, prolific writers, such as Alex Shoumatoff, writing on the murder of the rain-forest activist Chico Mendes from Brazil, Pete Hamill reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon , the multi-talented Gail Sheehy on the self-destruction of one-time presidential hopeful Gary Hart, or Dominick Dunne, profiling British socialite, Claus von Bülow, who was charged with attempted murder for trying to kill his wife (twice) with insulin injections--in 1982, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison--though, the verdict was later overturned.
Brown reportedly signed writers to substantial contracts, ranging, in some cases, from between $60,000 and $100,000 for four or more articles.
Her bold, creative, no holds barred approach, paid off handsomely.
In 1987, a mere three years after taking the reins, VF turned a profit and its new star editor was awarded with a $30,000 raise. What’s more, from January through March, 1989, VF issues made a profit of $1.4 million, a 63 percent rise in circulation (652,000), and a tripling of ad pages, from 431 in 1985 to 1,193.
What’s most intriguing about Tina Brown’s new book, centers on the title itself, “diaries.” You almost feel guilty peering into the private journal of someone else.
But the reader, I suspect, will quickly get over their uneasiness and soak up all the juicy gossip they can, whether it’s Carl Bernstein's affair with Margaret Jay, the wife of British ambassador to the United States Peter Jay, while married to writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron, seven months pregnant with their second child; Washington Post writer, Sally Quinn, disinviting Brown from attending hubby Ben Bradlees’s 65th birthday party for not warning her in advance of Christopher Buckley’s scathing VF review of her novel, “Regrets Only,’’ in which he referred to it as “cliterature;” strong suspicions that Arianna Stasinopoúlou's new husband (in 1987), Michael Huffington, might be gay; Donald Trump pouring a glass of wine down the back of Marie Bremmer at the Tavern at the Green for taking down the real estate mogul and his messy divorce from Ivanka ; or learn what Jerry Hall does to (then) husband Mick Jagger to prevent him from cheating on her before releasing him to the wolves.
Tina Brown doesn’t spare any arrows for The New York Times, claiming the paper is “pompous and badly laid out,” according to a 1988 entry from her diary. Similarly, she notes that Condé Nast’s other publication, The New Yorker, isn’t “feeling the pulse of the news” under the leadership of its editor, Bob Gottlieb.
Aside from the globs of juicy gossip, The Vanity Fair Diaries, catches the true spirt of the age, namely, the unabashed flaunting of wealth with extravagant parties, whether aboard Malcolm Forbes private yacht, The Highlander, with lobster and champagne flowing freely; or at Spago, Hollywood, with wall to wall stars and celebrities, including Ryan O’Neal, Jack Nicholson, Joan Collins, Walter Matheau, and Jack Lemmon.
To be sure, as Brown’s diaries corroborate, the 1980s was teeming with greed and glamour during the era of Reaganomics; by 1989, according to Newsweek, the top 1 percent of families owned 48 percent of the total financial wealth in the country.
In The Vanity Fair Diaries, in fact, readers get a rather obstructed view of how the other half lives in the Big Apple; the New York Tina Brown chronicles is the story of the big and powerful, the extravagantly rich, lunch at the opulent Four Seasons restaurant, the world of the glamorous with gold-plated penthouses overlooking the magnificent splendor of the Manhattan skyline, while dashing off to their ritzy Hampton addresses for weekends and the holidays.
Small wonder, then, that Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) was such a smash hit, his satirical novel, which chronicled the rise and fall of Sherman McCoy, an investment banker making a million a year, who is impervious to everything around him, except, that is, appearances, sex, and money. 1987 was also the year, the motion picture “Wall Street’’ hit the theaters in which the leading character, Gordon Gekko, played by actor Michael Douglas, affirms that “greed is good.”
To her credit, Brown, as recorded in her diary (1987), notices an appreciably rise in homeless sprawled across several streets in NYC.
And throughout The Vanity Fair Diaries, Brown is surrounded by the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping through New York, first as a casual observer, and then becoming emotionally distraught in losing some of her nearest and dearest friends.
According to the New York City Department of Health, there were 717 deaths with AIDS in New York City alone, from 1983 through 1992, the same time of Brown’s VF Diaries.
For the March, 1987 issue, VF ran a gallery of photos on the lives lost from AIDS, largely from the fashion and arts industries.
The Vanity Fair Diaries, it should be noted, isn’t solely devoted to Brown’s professional career, vast amount of entries center on her family life, especially her husband, Sir Harold Evans, the former editor of the Sunday Times. Harry, her beloved Harry, is Brown’s rock, her knight and shining armor, who brings a sense of calm to her life while she deals with the periodic storms raging within the VF editorial offices.
The persistent challenges of maintaining a sense of balance in raising two children, (George, born in 1986, and a daughter, Isabel, born in 1990), while revolutionizing one of the nation’s most vibrant magazines, reveals Brown to be just as vulnerable and exasperated as any working mother.
The Vanity Fair Diaries ends with Brown facing a new challenge in her professional career, a job she had being coveting for quite some time. On June 30, 1992, she was named editor of The New Yorker, age 38, replacing Robert Gottlieb, an announcement that “stunned the publishing industry,’’ according to a page one New York Times article.
As strong, independent, and competitive as Brown is, you would think her role models would be women like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, or Geraldine Ferraro.
But as Brown writes, “my role models are men-they have the lives I wanted.”
--Bill Lucey
January 10, 2018
Comments