If the ’80s had Instagram ...
Tina Brown’s ‘Vanity Fair Diaries’ gives decade the social media treatment
Thank the lord she’s a teetotaller. In Tina Brown’s no-holds-barred memoir of mayhem and glamour — a beau monde sweep of an era that belongs on the shelf with Fran Lebowitz’s “Social Studies,” Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” and “The Andy Warhol Diaries” — she claims to have long had an allergy to alcohol.
Given the diamond-spiked acuity of her observations, both from inside Condé Nast publications (which she likens to being in the “court of Louis XIV”), and from the jungle of Hollywood and high society (which she wrote down in real time while gallivanting night after night for a decade), it’s clear how she did it: she was stone sober.
“I have what I call ‘observation greed,’” is what the power editor adds, seated in the lobby of the King Edward Hotel, when passing through town recently to talk up “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 19831992.” It’s a book I’ll allow Meryl Streep to best surmise, with her back cover blurb that reads: “A milea-minute memoir I read like a parrot ... yelling, ‘What???!! ‘What!?!!!’ ‘WOWZA!’”
A product of Brown’s time at the high-low glossy — when she awoke the sleeping beauty by giving “intellectuals movie star treatment and movie stars an intellectual sheen” — but before she’d go on to edit The New Yorker, launch the short-lived magazine Talk and create The Daily Beast, the book is a precise excavation of the 1980s and the pre-Clinton ’90s. But why a diary, per se?
“I liked the idea of an onrushing, real-time authenticity,” Brown explains, admitting that she’d considered making it a traditional look back, but the diary (considering she had, indeed, written it all down) was a form that’s “good for the now ... there’s a kind of Instagram-ness to it.” Leaving little on the cutting-room floor, she was also drawn to its urgency: “You read it and you can feel me up close with Michael Jackson. Me up close with someone like Jackie O. It’s not overlain with what we know now.”
The result? Acute, deadpan, often withering. From dinners with Norman Mailer and Philip Roth (they circled “each other like dogs who need to be kept apart”) to an insane tête-à-tête with Warren Beatty (he insisted on them phoning up legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland to say hi), it’s all here. Some 400 pages.
From Nancy Reagan to Claus von Bulow, Joan Didion to Imelda Marcos, “Calvin” and “Ralph” on their fashion ascents, old-guard hostesses like Nan Kempner and Betsy Bloomingdale ... the likes of Tom Cruise and Demi Moore in the nascent gusts of their fame.
See, too: the social-sphere beginnings of a nowinfamous Donald Trump, one who pops up throughout Brown’s book like a coming-attractions poltergeist.
With a novelist’s sense of narrative, her descriptions kill. Exhibit A: a socialite-deep scene at Le
Cirque in which she describes “women in red capes eating plates of pink fish.” One person, on another page, is “a coiffed asparagus, exuding second-rate intellectualism,” while another is “tiny and bald and hairy in the wrong places” and one Rupert Murdoch has a face resembling a “melting rubber mask.”
Work was play and play was work, the author concedes now. With her lowered head and keen watchfulness, the eternal blond maintains that her social life “was the trigger for the best stories,” whether through “cultivating sources ... or just hearing things.” It’s a not bad schmooze lesson for reporters today who are behooved to hide behind screens. More broadly, there’s a lesson in there for any careerist: how relationships IRL are often more lucrative than those formed in the virtual netherworld of social.
“It’s how I got the Diana story,” she points out, referring to an infamous VF cover she strung, complete with headline that shouted “The Mouse That Roared.” The first significant spill about the Princess of Wales’ growing potency vis à vis the Royal Family and the fraying of what was a fairy tale wedding just years prior, it flowed from a tip that Brown got on the social hustings. Looking at it now, it jet-fuelled a mythology of Diana that endures to this day.
Ditto: a famous story that she put in the magazine about William Styron’s suicide attempt and grappling depression. She’d heard the beloved author talk about it at a fundraiser and her antennae sparked. Persuading him to write the groundbreaking story, it later morphed into the book Invisible Darkness, a classic of the genre.
She nods her head when suggest that “The Vanity Fair Diaries” is also a sort of “Alice in Wonderland story,” the arc of a 29-yearold who moved from England to Gotham and swiftly got swallowed up. The English-Yank divide — more pronounced in the ’80s — makes up one of the more interesting subthemes in the book.
“In the end I am always a spectator and a foreigner,” she writes at one point; at one another, she concludes, “America is too big, too rich, too driven. America needs editing.”
“That’s definitely a strain in the book. My heart longs for London, but also fall in love with the excitingness of New York, the multi-ethnic hot house of New York,” she elaborates, as we go on to discuss her early chrysalis stage as editor-in-chief of Tatler in London. We both do come to agree, however, that in 2017 London is the more truly international city, relative to NYC.
“You’re very good with funerals,” I blurt out, a compliment Brown receives warmly. I’m referring to the set-pieces she creates of several starry farewells: the boldfacestacked funeral for Andy Warhol, another one for charismatic tycoon Mal Forbes and yet another for Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell. Those diary entries are almost as good as the portrait of the one wedding she paints, that of Arianna Huffington, her old chum from Oxford. It’s a colourful scene, complete with Barbara Walters, decked as a bridesmaid in lavender, and a not-yet-out groom Michael Huffington.
One darker undertone in the book? It’s an undeniable one, given the city she travelled in the ’80s and that would be the AIDS epidemic.
“It was a war zone,” Brown says, “and what really struck me doing this project. We did an amazing story in the magazine, early on, on all the amazing people in the arts who’d been felled by AIDS. It was a culling of the entire world I worked in.”
Brown further reflects today, “We lost so many creative people ... but we lost a whole audience, too. I sometimes wonder how it shaped the whole culture afterwards.”
Another thing that bears noting, lest you think the book is all la-di-da and shindigs: how much ... well ... work there is on its pages. A master class in magazinemaking, it revels in the idea that a great editor is like a conductor and isn’t shy about the A-word (especially for women): ambition. A Machiavellian how-to, in some ways while balancing marriage and motherhood.
“People say, ‘Oh, she was so political’ like it’s a bad thing,” Brown begins to say, “but, actually, if you can’t figure out how to get things done and work with people, then you’re useless. How to nurture some people and make sure some people don’t just ruin what you’re doing ... that’s what it is. It’s a lot of dancing.”
Whether she was plotting with the likes of photographer Annie Leibovitz or doing an elaborate tango with Condé Nast’s mercurial sun king S.I. Newhouse (who died just weeks ago), this book shows “how to manage up and how to manage down; who to tell what, to get your message out. All of that.”
Before she has to dash — she had come to Toronto for a book launch event organized by the Women’s Brain Health Initiative — the great sculptress of stories gives me this one last spiel on her zeitgeist-hoovering memoir: “It’s a story of becoming. And the story of what fun a collaborative career can be. The ambition of a young career. Tasting it and being exhilarated by it.”