The Vanity Fair Diaries
by Tina Brown W&N 448pp £25 The Week Bookshop £22 (incl. p&p)
Tina Brown was only 30 when, in 1983, she was “parachuted in” to rescue the ailing Condé Nast magazine Vanity Fair, said Anthony Quinn in the Financial Times. Yet by then she had already made a success of editing Tatler and had worked at The Sunday Times (where she had an affair with its married editor, Harold Evans, 26 years her senior, who later became her husband – pictured). And in no time she turned Vanity Fair into the “house magazine of a resurgent celebrity beau monde”, raising its circulation from a few hundred thousand to more than a million. In this book, Brown describes her conquest of Manhattan with “caustic drollery and dash”, her “natural British irreverence” serving as a counterweight to the “bumptious spirit of American self-promotion” she quickly acquired. At times, the diaries resemble a “roll call of celebs, places and deals”, but Brown sustains our interest through her beady eye for detail and willingness to present herself as being regularly on the back foot.
These are the most compelling media diaries since Piers Morgan’s The Insider, said Nicholas Coleridge in the London Evening Standard, but with a more high-toned cast of characters. It’s all here, from Demi Moore “naked and pregnant” on the front cover, to Claus von Bülow photographed in black leather, from the “attractively acquisitive” Donald Trump complaining about having to sit through Wagner’s Ring Cycle, to a young Boris Johnson behaving like an “epic shit”. Brown is a writer of “great asperity” and an excellent observer of the peccadilloes of the rich, said Janice Turner in the New Statesman. But that said, her priorities often seem unappealingly skewed: the “only lowly people” she ever mentions are staff, and she tends to be “cruel about the ugly, stupid or fat”.
For British readers, there’s another problem, said Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday. Although the people Brown spent her days hobnobbing with were once “big names”, the majority are now forgotten. Many of the passages in these diaries – for example, her account of a dinner party attended by “the creamy TV anchor Diane Sawyer, mag magnate Malcolm Forbes […] and the gossip columnist Aileen Mehle, aka Suzy” – are virtually indecipherable. But when she encounters someone genuinely famous, her pen portraits are invariably “zippy”. She also writes with touching anxiety about her two children. Overall, however, these diaries are a mixed bag: amusing and genuinely revealing at times, but at others, stuffed with vainglorious hyperbole.
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