Dish (32 page)
Authors: Jeannette Walls
“Hollywood has no romance for me because I grew up practically in the lap of Margaret Rutherford,
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and people like her,” Brown said. “I saw nightmare egos all day long in the movie business, and I wanted no part of it.”
Once, when planning a cover story on Sylvester Stallone, an editor suggested assigning the piece to acerbic critic James Wolcott, a writer whose work Brown admired. “What’s the sense in wasting Wolcott on Stallone?” Brown said. “He’s such a bore…. In some profound way, he’s a joke to me. There’s something deeply camp about Stallone romping on the beach with this bimbo [his girlfriend].” The profile was given to writer Kevin Sessums, a good friend of David Geffen’s who had once worked in public relations. When someone protested that Sessums sometimes got a touch weak in the knees over his subjects, Brown replied, “It really doesn’t matter what the story says.” Then she added with a smirk: “Stallone is right up Kevin’s street, actually.”
Brown for the most part, only put proven Hollywood icons like Cruise and Madonna on the cover of
Vanity Fair,
but because there are only so many stars of the caliber Brown wanted, she began recycling cover subjects, adding to her anxiety that
Vanity
Fair’s
formula was growing stale. Brown also grew increasingly concerned about how her fluffy, flashy magazine was going to age. She told associates that she was worried that
Vanity Fair
was too lightweight and “too gay” and needed to “go straight.” “Americans have completely overdosed on celebrity,” she said. “The pretentiousness of social life in the eighties will subside. Replacing it will be privileged men and women recharging the landscape.”
Brown was so determined to tap into the serious Zeitgeist she saw looming, that in 1990 she took Ellen Barkin off the cover and replaced the actress with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Barkin was furious—she claimed that the only reason she had agreed to do the interview was that she was promised a cover—and she threatened to sue. By then, Brown knew she was too powerful for Barkin to fight with her. “It would be a bad career move,” Brown said dismissively. Explaining her new, politically engaged priorities, she explained, “My passion is to put, for example, El Salvador on the cover and still have strong newsstand sales.”
So, in 1992, when Si Newhouse offered Tina Brown the reins of the esteemed but financially troubled
New Yorker,
she grabbed them. “Seriousness will be sexy again,” she declared. “Substance is back in style.” She had taken gossip upscale; now she was convinced she would be able to take intellectualism mainstream. What she ended up doing, however, was extending the tabloid sensibility and culture of celebrity into the realm of literary journalism. While Brown ran some important and intelligent articles, those were often overshadowed by the “buzz” generated by fawning profiles of movie stars and Hollywood moguls as exemplified by the time Brown asked Roseanne to guest edit a special woman’s issue. Longtime
New Yorker
writer George W. S. Trow quit after a sixteen-page photo spread of the O. J. Simpson case, including Kato Kaelin blow-drying his hair. “For you to kiss the ass of celebrity culture at this moment that way,” Trow wrote in his resignation letter, “is like selling your soul to get close to the Hapsburgs—in 1913.”
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Brown had no choice but to go in for
glitz, said her defenders. “The patient was moribund and the new doctor had take drastic measures to revive it—including regular colonics of power and celebrity,” said writer John Seabrook. “Now that the patient seems to be getting healthier, hopefully the Barry Diller enemas can be cut back.” That seemed unlikely. Brown, who truly did love good writing and incisive thinking, was falling victim to the celebrity culture that she was instrumental in creating, the
New Yorker
under Brown was reduced to holding regular “roundtables” for advertisers with celebrity lures, including a special lunch, attended by Elton John and Lauren Hutton, to celebrate the unveiling of a ten-page Gianni Versace advertising insert.
In March 1994, shortly before the Academy Awards, Brown held a party in Hollywood to celebrate the
New Yorker’s
first Hollywood issue. Three hundred guests mingled under a billowing white tent in the garden of the Bel Air Hotel. Five hundred white paper lanterns glowed on the assembled stars and potentates as they exchanged air kisses and industry gossip; they buzzed about how Emma Thompson had shown up without husband Kenneth Branagh; they fussed over Lassie, who was there to promote a new video and a new line of Lassie products; and they discussed what to wear to the upcoming Academy Awards.
The
topic of the evening, however, was the magnitude of the names that Tina Brown had attracted. At one table Anjelica Huston giggled with Shirley MacLaine; at another Whoopi Goldberg chatted with Oliver Stone; at another, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening cuddled for the cameras. At table number thirteen sat Michael Ovitz, Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw, Ralph Fiennes, United Artists chief John Calley, Barbra Streisand—and Tina Brown. “This is as much Hollywood power as
anyone
can muster,” producer Joel Silver marveled.
Brown made a short speech. “This issue is not about Hollywood glitz at all,” she said. “It’s about the creative process of film. It’s about the life, rather than the lifestyle. It’s about the work rather than the money. We’re celebrating the work with this issue, not the money, not the lifestyle, not the planes, not the limos.” The crowd applauded enthusiastically. Then Brown blasted what she called “the snide puff piece”—the article that
pretends to praise its subject only to tear him down. A few of the writers there exchanged knowing glances; “snide puff piece” accurately described
Vanity Fair’s
specialty under Tina Brown. The editor then went on to chastise magazines for compromising their editorial integrity by making deals with publicists. The crowd was less enthusiastic. “When I heard that,” said one writer, “I thought, ‘Isn’t this like Frankenstein complaining about the havoc his monster has caused?’ ”
Then Robin Williams spoke. The evening, he declared, was really a charity benefit to raise cash for the money-losing
New Yorker.
“Antiques,” the actor said, “are a terrible thing to waste.” Williams applauded Brown’s Hollywoodization of the
New Yorker.
“You can’t sell a magazine,” he said, “with just literature and Connecticut haiku.” The actor, who had been reluctant to give interviews since he was burned by
People
nearly a decade earlier, was the subject of a fawning piece in the
New Yorker’s
Hollywood issue; it was written by a friend of his wife. “I would like to thank Tina Brown for the puff,” Williams said. “I still have a hard-on.” The audience howled with laughter. “Or, as Jack would say,” Williams said as he adopted a raspy Nicholson voice, “a
major
chubby.”
Tina Brown threw back her head and her laughter echoed through the tent. She appeared to be quite amused, quite pleased to be there among the crowd that epitomized Hollywood glitz. But then again, Tina Brown was always a very talented mimic.
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Some of the criticism may have been fueled by jealousy. Jane Amsterdam, editor of the then-hot Manhattan inc. considered Brown a rival. Amsterdam was married to Jon Larsen, the editor of the Village Voice and a good friend of Harold Evans and Brown, but according to one Manhattan inc. source, Amsterdam was regularly on the phone with Sally Quinn, making jokes about Brown and unkind references to her “udders.”
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Although this tidbit is repeatedly mentioned in profiles of Brown, an article in the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted Brown’s classmates who adamantly insisted that she was, in fact, eighteen when she went to Oxford. “I put the point to Tina Brown,” wrote Georgina Howell, “who conceded, ‘Well, I might have been just seventeen.’ ”
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Brown was third runner-up in the Miss Holiday Princess contest.
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The comparisons, however, are inevitable, including how Quinn also seduced her married boss with passionate letters. Brown made the comment after her infamous falling out with Quinn. Vanity Fair called Quinn’s novel Regrets Only “cliterature” and “a one-pound beach cutting-board and sun-tan lotion absorber.” Quinn disinvited Brown and Evans from Bradlee’s sixty-fifth birthday party. “As a professional journalist who specializes in hatchet jobs in the Washington Post,” Brown said, “I don’t think she should complain.” Replied Quinn, “Tina’s desperate for success and nothing matters to her except her magazine.” The two have supposedly reconciled, but Quinn maintained that she should have at least been warned about the seemingly unprovoked attack. According to a friend of Brown, it was not unprovoked and in fact was payback for a scathing review of Vanity Fair that ran in the Washington Post in the early days of the magazine—when Brown desperately needed good press. “It is one thing to make fun of soigné fatuities,” Curt Suplee wrote. “It is quite another to wallow in them. And the sheer bulk of banality in much of this magazine suggests not ridicule of vanity, but the glad embracing of it.”
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Evans sued the magazine at least three times, and in 1983, Evans’s lawyers demanded that the magazine stop writing about him and Brown for at least eighteen months: “We hereby give our solemn pledge that we will never, hereafter, in any circumstances, make any references whatsoever to these two clapped-out old has-beens,” the magazine announced. “Frankly, who wants to hear about them ever again?”
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Not long after the Reagans were no longer in power, Brown assigned a hatchet job on them.
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In 1983, when the Reagan camp was worried that the President’s age and health might become an issue in his reelection, political adviser Ed Rollins approached Si Newhouse’s buddy Roy Cohn for help. “I can give you anything the Newhouse papers have,” Cohn told Rollins. The resulting December 4 cover of Newhouse’s Parade magazine, “How to Stay Fit” by Ronald Reagan, effectively quieted the concerns about Reagan’s health.
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Buckley was so tight with the Reagans that he is said to have pulled strings to help Ron Reagan Jr. get into Yale.
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Which, at the time, was owned by Brown and Evans’s nemesis, Rupert Murdoch.
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Soon after Brown arrived at the New Yorker, she assigned Mark Singer to write a scathingly funny dissection of Trump. Trump was furious. “I guess the only good news about your recent story on me is that people don’t seem to be reading the New Yorker,” he wrote in a letter to Brown. “Almost nobody mentioned it to me—unlike two recent covers of People magazine.” Trump also sent a letter to his friend Steve Florio: “Steve, you will never make a profit with Tina Brown editing the New Yorker. She is highly overrated and the magazine is very boring. Best wishes, Donald.” Florio was said to have taken the letter to heart.
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Brown was almost certainly referring to Ron Perlman, owner of Revlon, a big advertiser in Vanity Fair.
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Miss Marple in the Agatha Christie films Tina’s father produced.
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Brown gave Trow’s letter a very public platform. At the New Yorker’s seventieth anniversary party, actor John Lithgow performed the part of Trow. Debra Winger, complete with a clipped British accent, read Brown’s response: “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”
“This is a lousy time for gossip,” Liz Smith complained. It was early 1990, and Liz Smith was America’s queen of gossip, but she was feeling like an outsider in her own profession. “With all those supermarket tabloids paying for stories, you can’t compete,” she said. “Scandals like Gary Hart and Jim Bakker that used to belong to the columnists are on the front page of the
New York Times….
It’s died out. The column isn’t that important because no one is shocked by anything.” A handsome woman with a weary smile and a pageboy haircut that was getting increasingly blonder, Liz Smith was facing her sixty-seventh birthday. Her column wasn’t just her job, it was her life. She would get up every morning at 9
A.M
. in the cluttered, two-bedroom high-rise apartment she rented on East Thirty-eighth Street that doubled as her office; she would make coffee, read over the notes from the previous evening, skim ten newspapers, and she and her two long-time assistants, St. Clair Pugh and Denis Ferrara, would field calls from press agents eager to get a mention in her column. “We need a lead!” she would always say. “We need a lead!” By 1
P.M.
Liz Smith had filed her column; three times a week she
would head over to the
Live at Five
offices to broadcast her regular segment there. Then, just about every evening, she’d go to some function—sometimes as many as three or four, but she was trying to cut down. She would greet and hug and kiss her “friends,” people like Malcolm Forbes, Madonna, Barbara Walters, Gayfryd Steinberg, Elizabeth Taylor, David and Helen Gurley Brown, Mike Wallace, and Candice Bergen. Many of them, she knew, weren’t really her friends. “Glamour, schlamor,” she said. “It’s all business.” What she was really after was news to fill her column. Still, it wasn’t an entirely bad life. “I am overpaid, overfed, overentertained, overstimulated,” she said. “What’s not to like about being Liz Smith?”