CELEBRITY EDITOR:
In a fascinating interview, Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, reveals to Christina Lamb the jaw-dropping reality of working with the world’s biggest names.
Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown reveals the reality of working with the A-list
It’s an irresistible image. The world’s most famous media couple – Tina Brown, one-time queen of Manhattan, who, by the age of 40 had edited Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and her husband, Sir Harry Evans, celebrated former editor of UK newspaper The Sunday Times, starting each day in a New York diner with piles of newspapers – and their iPhones – discussing stories and how they would cover them over scrambled eggs and decaf cappuccinos.
“I would have absolutely died to have done a newspaper,” Tina says. “I suspect there’s nothing more fun.”
It’s not too late, I suggest. At 64, she is trim in a cream silk shirt, tight pants and snakeskin heels and could pass for much younger. She looks at me quizzically – she wasn’t suggesting she was too old for the job. “But now papers are not long for this world in terms of print.”
The English boarding-school girl who claims to have been “terribly shy” may not have edited a newspaper, but hasn’t done badly. We meet on the ground floor of her five-bedroom Manhattan townhouse, where an assistant shows me into a library looking out onto the garden. The shelves are full of bound magazines and books, most written by the couple’s famous friends, photos of the family (she and Harry have two children, George, 31, and Isabel, 27) and a framed thank-you letter from her friend, Hillary Clinton.
Tina’s new book, based on the secret diaries she kept during her time at Vanity Fair in the 1980s, features almost every famous figure from Hollywood and New York society, including Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, Jackie Onassis, Hugh Grant, Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump.
It’s a dizzying round of cocktails and black-tie dinners, revealing the secrets behind such iconic covers as the naked and heavily pregnant
Demi Moore, shot by Annie Leibovitz, or that of President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, smooching at the White House, captured by the Scottish photographer Harry Benson, who switched on a boom box playing Sinatra as they walked in. Tina personally had to go to the White House to persuade the Reagans to let her publish the image – just another day in the life of the US’s glossiest editor.
Some of her fabled parties have taken place in this very room. But, as I wonder who has sat on this sofa before me, I’m told the furniture is always sent away to make space. “It sits in a removal truck and drives around the city,”
Tina says. “Harry has said there are times he would rather be in the truck doing his emails.”
Behind the shiny facade, life has not always been easy. The wave of accusations about the Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein carrying out decades of sexual harassment and rape of actresses and assistants has awakened dark memories for Tina. In 1998, she made a disastrous career decision, leaving The New Yorker to start a new magazine called Talk with Weinstein. Its Gatsbyesque-launch was the talk of New York, with 1000 guests, including Madonna, Kate Moss, Hugh Grant and Pierce Brosnan, taken on boats to the Statue of Liberty, where they were served Champagne and canapés amid Chinese lanterns and choreographed fireworks. “My great career move!” she grimaces. “That was so smart, oh boy.”
Talk magazine was an epic flop. It folded in early 2002, having lost an estimated
$50 million. But that is not all she’s referring to.
“I left The New Yorker for Miramax because I thought the work was so good – Shakespeare in Love, My Left Foot – all these wonderful films, but behind the scenes it was horrendous.”
Did Weinstein (Miramax’s boss) make advances on her, too? “I never experienced
that, but I did experience him as a vile bully,” she replies. “He was a total bully. I had PTSD after working for him.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone bullying the no-nonsense Tina, so I ask what she means.
“Profanity, shouting, humiliating, lying, aggressing. He was always going round town assigning articles or books from gossip columnists who had something on him, and then I had to deal with the fact he’d assigned some article or book I had no room for and no budget to publish and it got me extremely angry. Now I understand much more this was the way he kept the world at bay. I felt I lost my sense of self that last year with Harvey. I began to let him bully me. I made a lot of mistakes because he bullied me.
“He was continually pushing me in a direction I didn’t want to go,” she continues. “He changed the vision of the mag and I couldn’t resist it. He made it on glossy paper with a movie-star face on the cover, which I knew was wrong. He wanted another Vanity Fair, a celebrity mag so he could enhance his power in that world.”
What does she mean by PTSD? “After I left Talk, I felt very, very traumatised by him,” she says. “I didn’t want to go into any management situation after that. I didn’t think I ever could again. I spent two years writing my book about Diana [Spencer], which was a wonderful relief.”
Others at Talk have said they knew what was happening. Did she have any idea what Weinstein was up to? “No,” she insists. “I never hung out with him after hours. I assumed there were girls galore, but that’s very different from thinking he’s a serial rapist.
“The stories are monstrous,” she adds. “When I heard the tape of him trying to persuade the Italian model to go to his room, it brought back the PTSD, because it reminded me of the bullying, cajoling and constant pressure.”
I wonder if she experienced any sexual harassment as an attractive blonde woman working in a male-dominated industry. “People have come on to me inappropriately, of course, but not to that point,” she says.
“But don’t forget I was a boss from the age of 25, and, apart from Harvey Weinstein, the people I worked for were perfect gentlemen.
“My experience was much more about feeling excluded or trivialised or dissed because I was a woman.”
As the woman who put Vanity Fair back into profit and the first female editor of The New Yorker, it seemed to me she was the toast of New York. Did she really feel trivialised?
“Yes, constantly!” she insists. “Women don’t get the same recognition as men and are not written about in the same way.”
She cites as an example an obituary of
S.I. (Si) Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast, who died last year. “One columnist in describing Si’s life said he then brought in the ‘buzz-obsessed Tina Brown and Anna Wintour’, then went on to talk about all the male editors as if they’d had this great legacy. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s me and Anna, right, the Buzz Sisters!’ I totally saved Vanity Fair, brought it back from the dead and turned it into a juggernaut. Anna brought in billions of dollars to Vogue and yet, there we are, the buzz-obsessed. It never changes.”
The girl who once dreamt of conquering Manhattan has come a long way from the idyllic village in Buckinghamshire where she grew up in a bay-windowed house with wisteria round the door. Yet, even then, she was rubbing shoulders with stars – her father was a “gentleman film producer” at Pinewood Studios and best friends with Peter Ustinov. Her glamorous mother had been PA to Laurence Olivier. Sent to “absurd St Trinian’s boarding schools”, she was expelled from three in succession, once for leading a “knicker revolution” over a policy allowing underwear to be changed just three times a week.
She ended up at Oxford, where she read English and was “swept off her feet” by the then-literary-wunderkind Martin Amis, describing lying in bed with him reading
Larkin poems. “He’d graduated, so was super-cool,” she says.
Her early articles for the New Statesman, Punch and The Sunday Telegraph caught the eye of then editor of The Sunday Times, Harry Evans, who asked her to come and see him. Their initial meeting was inauspicious. Harry’s formidable secretary informed Tina the editor was busy planning the front page
and could not be disturbed. After waiting for two hours, she slipped in through the door. A phalanx of shirt-sleeved editors, gathered round a layout table, looked up in astonishment. “A pair of dazzling blue eyes met mine,” she recounts in the book. “Don’t bother me now, love,” he said.
For her, she says, it was love at first sight. “It’s those blue eyes, they got me.” Harry had been married 20 years and their affair became the talk of Fleet Street.
Some might see this as Tina sleeping her way to the top, I venture. Her own blue eyes fix on mine. “At the time, it was a career step down for me, falling in love with Harry,” she says. “My goal was to write for The Sunday Times, but, when I got involved with the editor, I thought I couldn’t write for them and I left immediately. I thought, ‘I am going to create my own world.’ I didn’t just want to be known as his girlfriend.”
At 25, she was hired as the editor of Tatler, a 270-year-old magazine that was selling only 10,000 copies. She had a staff of just 10 – mostly her friends – and a modest budget. Circulation rocketed as she documented the rise of Princess Diana. “I took to editing immediately,” she says. She was helped by masterclasses from Harry. Tina and Harry married at the Long Island beach house of Ben Bradlee, renowned editor of The Washington Post, who directed coverage of the Watergate scandal. Around the same time, Tina was approached by Vanity Fair, first as a consultant. She starts the diary of those years with her arrival in New York, aged just 29, “brimming with fear and insecurity”.
Within a few months, she was made editor of one of the US’s most famous magazines. Was it terrifying? “It was a wonderful time – coming from England with a new pair of eyes. They did all want me to fail and that heightened the adrenaline, to feel constantly under attack,” she says. “But, when you are very young and new, you have less to lose, so I just plunged in. You don’t get so much performance anxiety when you’re in the throes of do or die.”
Despite decades in New York, Tina still sounds English. She is funny, friendly, but also tough. Friends who worked for her talk of
3am emails, and when I turned down a job with her once, she said: “You don’t have the balls.” She’s your best friend until those knowing blue eyes turn to ice.
The Vanity Fair diaries are very much a social history of a decade of excess, and just reading them is exhausting. Apart from the social whirl, which she says she survived because she doesn’t drink alcohol, there is the challenge of turning the magazine around, the endless quest to get advertising, and dealing with disloyal staff, egos, and male writers not enjoying criticism from a woman.
Somehow she combined all this with motherhood. In the diaries, she talks for the first time of the traumatic birth of her first child, George, born in January 1986, two months early, weighing just 2kg. “In my cocky, breezy, I-am-superwoman way, I never dream that anything bad could happen with our baby,” she writes. Seeing his “tiny struggling body covered in tubes and plasters”, she recalls: “I just sat in front of his glass container and cried.” In her diary, she blamed herself: “With my neurotic moralising streak, I see what’s happened as a punishment for a surfeit of thoughtless success.”
Though George recovered and was home a month after being born, she was terrified he had been damaged. Every cold or snuffle was, she says now, “like an arrow piercing”.
“It was very scary,” she says. “I watched him all the time for any effects.” In particular, when she saw George with other children, she grew concerned that he did not mix in the same way. “It turned out he had Asperger’s, but we didn’t know because we really didn’t have a label at that time.”
“At a dinner, she and I sat close to each other. Close up, she was mesmerising. Her face is always slightly out of whack with her expression, as if they are two separate entities. She has perfected a fascinated stare. Sitting finishingschool upright, she looks into your face, not your eyes, and not mine, I hasten to say. ‘Crazed’ is what I decided about Jackie by the end of the evening. If you cleared the room and left her alone, she’d be in front of a mirror, screaming.”
Five years after George, she had a daughter, Isabel. How did she manage? “It was a constant pull and push,” she says. “Everything you see on the outside is belied by what is at home, which is chaos at all times.”
“I made very rigid rules for myself,” she adds. “I would drop the kids at school, then go to the office and be back at 6pm to have dinner with them. But then I would go out again. It was super-chaotic, high-oxygen stuff for years.
“Every working mother feels they miss certain things. I’ve had endless dark nights of the soul when I’ve thought, ‘Should I have been there more?’” When she recently asked Isabel her unhappiest moment, her daughter replied it was the time Tina missed her gym display. “I was rushing back on the red-eye, but it was at 9am and my plane arrived too late. I was at every damn thing but that gym display!”
The demands of the day job were, of course, unrelenting. Among the many personalities who feature in the diaries is Donald Trump, then a fixture on the New York social scene, initially with his first wife, Ivana, then with follow-up Marla Maples. In 1990, Tina’s Vanity Fair ran a profile of Trump as he was divorcing Ivana that included the revelation that he keeps a collection of Hitler’s speeches in his office. Tina jotted in her diary: “Marie [Brenner, a journalist at Vanity Fair] has been able to establish such a pattern of lying and loud-mouthing in Trump that it’s incredible he still prospers and gets banks to loan him money. Great quote where his brother says Donald was the kid who threw cake at the birthday party.”
More than a year later, Marie Brenner was at a black-tie gala in Manhattan when she felt something cold and wet running down her back. Thinking it was an accident, she didn’t turn round initially, until she heard other guests pointing and yelping, “Oh, my God, look what he just did!” The man in question was Donald Trump, who had deliberately emptied a glass of wine down the back of her dress. “Wasn’t that astonishing?” asks Tina. “What you realise is he hasn’t really changed. That was such an infantile thing to do.”
At that time, did she ever imagine that Trump could be president?
“Absolutely not!” she replies. “But interestingly, in Vanity Fair’s Hall of Fame citing of him, we said, ‘He thinks he should be negotiating arms deals with the Russians,’ so even then we could see he had pretensions to be more than a real estate guy.”
These days, Tina runs her own company, Tina Brown Live Media, and has set up
Women in the World, an annual summit that provides a platform for inspirational women to tell their stories. However, she’s restless, says her husband Harry, at home with her two cats and the empty bedrooms where her children once slept. “I am feeling the bestirrings of my news demons,” she says.
“I’d like to try to make Women in the
World into a news network,” she adds. “I do think there’s a moment.”
Though she insists her socialising days are over – “I only have one boring long skirt” – the night after our interview she invites me to dinner. Guests at the Tina townhouse include Henry Kissinger, Samantha Power, former American ambassador to the UN, and Ronan Farrow, the journalist son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow who broke the key Weinstein revelations. Earlier, she told me the reason she went to so many parties was “observation greed”. Even now, she is never off duty.
It is, of course, impossible not to write this piece without wondering how she would edit it. “The real agony of editing is not the bad piece versus the good piece,” she writes.
“It’s the borderline piece – perfectly good, inoffensively unexceptional, just okay.”
Being just okay in Tina’s world of fabulous people is about as damning as it gets.
“Being photographed so much, I am convinced, changes your face. There is a layer of legend to get through before you can pinpoint the familiar asymmetries of flesh. He had a whiff of decadence you only see as you get close.”
The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992, by Tina Brown, Hachette, is out now.