How Auberon Waugh fell for Vanity Fair’s Tina Brown

PuBlIshINg queen tina Brown so impressed the late Auberon Waugh when she interviewed him as a student at oxford university that the eminent journalist is said to have kick-started her highly successful media career.

she went on to edit tatler aged 25, before decamping to America to take charge of Vanity Fair, then the New Yorker and later talk magazine. however, she has now confirmed for the first time that she not only received Waugh’s ongoing patronage, but was also the object of his ardour which endured for years.

Brown, 63, writes in her newly published memoir, the Vanity Fair Diaries, of an amorous approach in 1986, five years after she married former sunday times editor sir harry Evans.

‘saw Bron Waugh for lunch and he was oddly difficult. then in the taxi he grabbed my hand and kissed my hair and got very emotional.

‘I think he feels he has lost me now

to America and kept talking about how London must seem to me “an inconsequential village”.

‘It’s amazing to think that it’s only 13 years since I was the English lit student at Oxford he sponsored and mentored and fell in love with.

‘He’s changed very little, but I feel that his sense of his own limitations... are more oppressive than before.’

Long-standing Private Eye contributor Waugh, who had four children with his wife Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow, died in 2001 aged 61. Brown adds: ‘I loved him for his wit, and for a decade after our meeting we conducted a prolific, romantically charged pen friendship.’

Another of Tina Brown’s older admirers during her Oxford days was the novelist Martin Amis.

He credits her with rescuing him from a girlfriend-less stigma and said their love affair was ‘over too soon’.

‘She was very pretty and ebullient and publicly affectionate. She gave me confidence.’