Without fear (and without favors, too)
Behind the scenes at Vanity Fair
Even Tina Brown’s complaint calls were captivating.
Take a certain 1991 phone conversation: “Mick Jagger called me today in agitation about a Nancy Collins cover-story interview, something that’s taken me two years to get. ... ‘Look, it’s like this,’ the loud, cockney voice of ‘Satisfaction’ blurted from my speakerphone. ‘Nancy keeps on about me mum. She’s just got this bee in her bonnet about me mum.’ ”
Ms. Brown ultimately assigned another writer to the Jagger article for Vanity Fair, the magazine she edited for eight years and transformed with daring, indepth and dazzling reports and photos.
She was editor when President and Mrs. Reagan playfully danced for the cover, Demi Moore posed very pregnant and very naked (for what initially were intended as private photos), and Princess Diana, Claus von Bulow, Michael Jackson, Mikhail Gorbachev and others stopped subscribers and newsstand customers in their tracks.
“The Vanity Fair Diaries: 19831992” features excerpts from the hand-written diaries she kept in blue school exercise books. Ms. Brown documents professional and personal milestones (and occasional setbacks), drops more names than a red-carpet announcer, discloses her escalating salaries, and shares succinct, surprisingly frank assessments of the famous and infamous.
At a 1983 event for Lana Turner, the actress belatedly arrived “lifted, tucked and coiffed into chapel-of-rest perfection.” As actor Warren Beatty made a call during lunch, charm, tenderness and intimacy oozed out of him.
When Hollywood producer Robert Evans took off his aviator shades “he looked so debauched I recoiled … he’s got to be the nearest thing to the devil of anyone I have encountered.”
Ms. Brown proves what she suspected about Dominick Dunne, whom she met at a friend’s apartment in 1983. She learned about his daughter’s murder and suggested the novelist write about the coming trial in Los Angeles. She reasoned, “You can teach people structure and how to write a lead. But you can’t teach them how to notice the right things.”
She noticed the right things, sometimes during endless rounds of breakfasts, lunches, drinks, dinners and parties. “Social life is the trigger for all the best stories I have ever got, or at any rate, it helps me secure, or conceptualize, most of them.”
Her worlds sometimes collided, as when a VF reviewer panned a Sally Quinn novel and the D.C. society maven disinvited Ms. Brown to a birthday party for husband Ben Bradlee.
The couple had hosted the wedding of Tina Brown and Harold Evans, so the cold shoulder was no small matter, although fences eventually were mended.
Jackie Onassis, attending a dinner celebrating Clark Clifford’s memoir, was not so forgiving after a VF cover that was “very ‘pro’ her” but admittedly pretty vulgar and intrusive.
The former first lady recommended a piece in a competing magazine that upbraided one of Ms. Brown’s regular writers. Mrs. Onassis delivered a “delicate sideways look to me across the salmon puff pastry, a look that registered she knew I knew she was shafting me and why. It was masterful.”
The 436-page book is a slow starter and, at times, devolves into too much inside baseball and party patter.
The notion of socializing with entertainment, political or news notables who might be sources or the subject of flattering or faultfinding articles in the magazine is given short shrift. So is the idea of sharing some dishy comments from others (not all named) who probably never imagined they would turn up in print decades later.
Nevertheless, the book documents how Ms. Brown assembled her team at Vanity Fair one hiring or firing and blazingly bright idea and execution at a time. She aimed for a mix of glamour and substance; if a story or photo package broke news, all the better.
Just when Ms. Brown appears to be Wonder Woman, she briefly acknowledges the strain of being a writer-editor, wife, mother and half of a workaholic couple. “I long to read a book, write, get drunk (if only I could drink!), do anything other than live in this work-dominated monotone we have inflicted on each other.”
An epilogue briefly touches on Ms. Brown’s willingness to embrace another colossal challenge — becoming editor of The New Yorker at age 38. Less than a decade later, Queen Elizabeth honored her as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to overseas journalism.
Ms. Brown’s other accomplishments include writing a biography of Princess Diana and founding The Daily Beast.
The diaries provide a snapshot of a time, a brainy plucky woman and a belief that all things are possible — and publishable.