Gossip (27 page)

Tina Brown came into the world when the English aristocracy was still in existence, envied if no longer much admired, still holding a snobbish card or two, but no longer in possession of the kind of power to squash a Becky Sharp–like career of the kind she had set upon. As a testament to the breakup of the old English class system, the man Tina married, Harold Evans, twenty-five years older than she, though working class, rose to the pinnacle of English newspaper journalism, first as editor in chief of the
London Sunday Times
and then of the
Times
itself. He was installed in the latter job, from which he would soon be humiliatingly fired, by no less than an Australian, Rupert Murdoch. Working-class editors, Australian press lords, pushy young female journalists with thrusting bosoms ... ah, England, it long ago began to look as if there may not always be an England after all—it was, in any event, Mick Jagger's country now.

Further evidence that the old class system was breaking up was apparent in the hiring of Tina Brown to edit
Tatler,
a magazine founded in the early eighteenth century by Richard Steele, the editor, with Joseph Addison, of the
Spectator,
which in more recent years had been devoted to chronicling the social lives of what was left of the British aristocracy. Rather than continuing worshipfully to chronicle these people, Tina turned the magazine into an organ of sly mockery of them. She invited her old Oxford pals—Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, among others—to join her in the venture.

Tina remained three and a half years at
Tatler.
During this time, she raised both the circulation of the magazine and her own visibility, but did rather less for the financial health of the magazine, which lost money. This would be a repeating pattern in Tina Brown's career: she enlivens the institutions she works for, adding greatly to their circulation, and while they lose money, she gains reputation. Reputation, please note, not prestige, for prestige was not a chip at the poker game that Tina saw herself playing. "Prestige is dead," she once told someone who spoke to her of the reverence in which
The New Yorker
had long been held.

In 1983, Samuel I. Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast magazines and, with his family, of many newspapers, acquired
Tatler.
He had earlier bought, and had plans for revamping, the old
Vanity Fair,
a slick magazine of the 1920s, edited by Frank Crowninshield, a renowned editor of his day. Newhouse had quickly run through two editors for the new
Vanity Fair
—the first, a man named Richard Locke, lasted all of three issues; the second was Leo Lerman, whom we encountered earlier and who had been a free-ranging editorial adviser for Condé Nast. A Newhouse lieutenant suggested Tina Brown for the job. The timing could not have been better. With Harry Evans a few years before fired by Rupert Murdoch from the London
Times,
and Tina beginning to grow bored with
Tatler
and its rather circumscribed readership, life in America must have seemed a smashing idea. Though only thirty-one in 1984, Tina was too savvy not to realize that, as a theater of operations for anyone with her ambition, England was now second rate, if not utterly finished. America was the place to be.

She began work at
Vanity Fair
surrounded by enemies, chiefly those who felt a lingering loyalty to Leo Lerman, whom they believed had been ditched in favor of this young English upstart. How could Newhouse put a big-budget American magazine in the hands of a woman who had no firsthand experience of the country? Tina's want of American experience would remain a criticism of her when she later took over the editorship of
The New Yorker.
What did she know of America, having seen it only from the inside of Newhouse-paid-for limousines or from the private jets or in the homes of the superwealthy of New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C.?

Richard Locke, during his brief tenure at
Vanity Fair,
had tried to take the magazine in a serious direction. Then Leo Lerman headed it in a metropolitan direction: sophisticated, urban, yet somehow intellectual. Tina had other ideas. She intended to bring a new element to slick-magazine journalism, to cause continual buzz and constant stir, to ride the wind of the with-it. The famous, the rich, the powerful, these were to be the subjects at the heart of
Vanity Fair
under its new British editor. Celebrity journalism is the name given to the direction in which she took the magazine.

Editing a magazine seems simple enough. An editor decides what she wants in it; she assigns writers to produce articles on these subjects; she uses other editors to get the articles in the most presentable form, with photographers and art directors to make the presentation of the articles as appealing as possible. If an editor has a good sense of the whole, of the forest in which she plants her trees, the mix of articles will make for a strong issue, something in it for everyone and lots in it for most of the magazine's regular readers.

Simple enough—but if you are Tina Brown, it is imperative that your articles cause buzz, which may be defined as the excitement of being on the inside, up to the moment, in the know, at least as voyeuristically as reading can make it. Buzz is created by discovering and writing about those people who, owing to their money, power, talent, or good looks, seem admirably, enviably well ahead of the rest of us in the always precarious game of leading the great good glamorous life. Buzz is the sizzle—hold the steak, which may or may not be served later. In the world of buzz, the names of these people are always changing: people once so of the moment suddenly seem so out of it, themselves no longer of the least moment, but dull, dreary—buzzless.

Buzz of course also assumes lots of gossip, for if buzz is the destination, gossip is usually the mode of getting there. "Insiderly," a word of Tina Brown's devising, was the quality that she was after. To know the kind of clothes significant people wear and the houses and apartments they live in and what they pay for them; to understand their psychological motivations, their romantic interests, their social calendars; to know these things, and anything else of gossipy interest about them, yet somehow not feel demeaned by one's own low curiosity—this is the trick of producing buzz.

Buzz-producing people were almost invariably celebrities, who captured the interest of the moment through their money or connections or outlandish behavior or social antecedents, or simply by their talent for attracting publicity: Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos, Donald Trump, Madonna, Cher, Kennedy widows and children, movie directors and stars, people known less for durable achievement than for embodying the spirit of the time, the Zeitgeist. Capturing the Zeitgeist has always been the name of Tina's desire. Madonna is perhaps a perfect example, a woman endlessly changing herself to suit the style of the moment; in fact, Tina Brown herself has been called the Madonna of contemporary journalism.

The present is the only tense Tina Brown seems ever to have known or cared to live in. What's going on, what's going down, what's happening, what buzzin'—now! Occasional pieces would appear in
Vanity Fair
about Haiti or Russia or on serious artists, but the role of these was little more than that of the Bible in the whorehouse; they weren't what brought people to the magazine. As befits a magazine devoted to the now, nothing published in it endured, nor was meant to. The only journalist whose career Tina Brown can have been said to have made is that of the photographer Annie Leibovitz. ("Annie is a Zeitgeist creature herself," Tina said.) Dominick Dunne was another
Vanity Fair
mainstay; he reported on the murder trials of the rich and famous, with plenty of room left over for name-dropping and gossip. ("The reason I'm good on assholes," Dunne averred, "is that I was once an asshole myself.")

Vanity Fair
was a magazine devoted to a fantasy of the highlife. The highlife, as Tina Brown understood it, was royalty, clothing designers, movie stars, the wildly wealthy. What was on offer for readers was the illusion that one was getting a privileged peek into how these people really lived. The editor hired what today we would call networkers to sidle up to and seduce the magazine's subjects and let them expose themselves to the
Vanity Fair
treatment: elaborate photo sessions, admiring prose, hyped-up profiles, all in exchange for tidbits of gossip and an insiderly view of their lives.

If one had to select a single sentence to stand for all Tina's years as editor of
Vanity Fair,
it would be one from her own article "The Mouse That Roared," about the young Princess Diana, who was just then engaging the frivolous world's attention in a powerful way; the sentence, the article's concluding one, reads: "The debonair Prince [Charles] is pussy-whipped from here to eternity." At the sentence's final cadence one can hear the bells of Westminster Abbey gong to mark the demise of a once great country, done in by gossipy journalism.

Under Tina Brown the circulation of
Vanity Fair
continued to rise, at one point reaching more than a million readers, and in 1991 it even showed a profit. Clearly it was, as they say in the trade, the "hot book" of its day. But over the years of Tina's tenure it is estimated that
Vanity Fair
lost roughly $63 million. The reason the magazine lost so much money was because of its editor's impressive extravagance. She paid the highest salaries to steal editors from other publications; the fees she paid writers were much greater than any other magazine paid, and not infrequently she scrapped the articles they produced, doubtless for their being of insufficient sizzle. Under her editorship, the magazine had a strong publicity arm, and was known for the Gatsby-like hollow grandeur of its parties. As an editor, Tina was not about making money, not about producing literature, but about attracting attention.

Her skill in doing so clearly impressed Si Newhouse, for not long after acquiring
The New Yorker
he decided to make Tina Brown its editor. (He also installed her husband as president and editor in chief of Random House, the publishing firm.) One thing to turn a fledgling—also failing—magazine like
Vanity Fair
over to a brash journalist without any conviction apart from the importance of being up to the moment; quite another to turn over to her
The New Yorker,
that holy of holies, easily the most sacrosanct publication in twentieth-century America.

Whereas
The New Yorker
before Tina Brown was loved, while she was its editor it was talked about. Buzz, buzz, buzz. To be sure, it had been talked about before, but in a different way, having published controversial essays by Rachel Carson on pollution, Hannah Arendt on the victims of the Holocaust, and James Baldwin on the Black Muslims. But buzz, as Tina understood it, was never part of the deal on West Forty-third Street, where the magazine had had its offices for decades. Instead of buzz, the old
New Yorker,
some thought, specialized only in zzzz, running excruciatingly lengthy articles on wheat, geological faults, and other distinctly unbuzzy subjects.
New Yorker
writers were coddled, allowed to take years to turn in articles; under William Shawn's editorship, the magazine's writer on baseball, Roger Angell, would sometimes turn in his piece on the World Series in February. Sometimes it seemed as if the magazine was making a determined—and actually quite successful—effort not to be up to the moment.

Tina Brown eliminated criticism and short stories from
Vanity Fair,
and was apparently not keen to have them in
The New Yorker,
though these items were at the heart of the magazine's appeal. When she became its editor, she announced that "seriousness will be sexy again. Substance is back in style." The reaction was furious. Garrison Keillor viewed Tina Brown's ascension to the editorship of
The New Yorker
by noting: "If some ditzy American editor went to London, took over the
Spectator,
and turned it into, say,
In Your Face: A Magazine of Mucus,
there would be a big uproar. Here, a great American magazine falls into the clutches of a British editor who seems to know this country mainly from television and movies and nobody says much about it."

Keillor was one of the
New Yorker
contributors who resigned upon Tina Brown's hiring. Tina let go of some seventy-odd other writers and editors, many of whom had longtime relationships with the magazine. The tendency was to cut away—how to say it?—the less buzzy; among them were John McPhee, the excellent science writer Jeremy Bernstein, and the earnest Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew. From
Vanity Fair
she brought over writers who knew how to deliver the kind of goods she wanted. Assuming readers had as short an attention span as she—"boring" was her ultimate putdown for writing that in her view did not come off—Tina cut the length of
New Yorker
articles, allowed the deliberately outré into its pages, and emphasized the lively over the thoughtful.

Some felt that Tina Brown saved
The New Yorker,
which was said to be on the slide into gradual decline. She certainly did what she could to shock the magazine's old-line readers. She published covers meant to outrage, such as the one in which a Hasid is kissing a black woman. She turned one issue over to the foulmouthed comedienne Roseanne Barr, an experiment that flopped. She opened the gates to rougher language and more sex-ridden stories. Daphne Merkin, a writer with a penchant for unnecessary confession, published an article on the pleasure that being spanked by men gave her. With her emphasis on Hollywood, the magazine began to feel, some thought, as if it were being edited in Los Angeles.

Tina received some praise and much criticism for her efforts as editor of
The New Yorker.
But she achieved her main object, which was to cause a stir, to be talked about. In the course of all the stir, more of Si Newhouse's money went down the tubes, vast sums of it, to pay for articles never published, issues torn up and remade at the last possible moment, galas whose motive was further networking in Washington and Hollywood. Celebrity journalism, as Tina practiced it, did not come cheap.