The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown
We live in a moment when the media world has been turned upside down. Budget cuts, magazines and newspapers shrinking or shutting down, the winning business model still elusive across most of the industry.
So it’s hard to fathom that there was a time when the media industry was flush. Well there was. It was the go-go eighties, when worrying about budgets seemed gauche, when Wall Street morphed from a somewhat respectable, white shoe endeavor, to a time of titans and hero worship, junk bonds and arbitrage. Reagan’s trickle-down economics was supposed to benefit everyone but the trickle froze, widening the gap between the haves and have nots. It was a gilded age for many and Tina Brown’s new book, The Vanity Fair Diaries chronicles that time with her unsurpassed powers of observation coupled with sharp, acerbic writing that is a delicious insight into a bygone time.
Arriving in 1980’s New York, this dynamic editor, still in her 20’s and flush from her success as editor of the British society magazine Tatler, which she turned around, Brown was tasked with revitalizing the money pit magazine at Condé Nast from its ho hum existence to a vital, trendsetting cultural touchstone. Could a magazine that thrived in the 1920’s but was folded, after the Great Depression into Vogue come back? Until she arrived, the answer seemed no. The magazine had languished since its recent resurrection and was on life support.
Tina Brown turned out to be the perfect person at the perfect time to take full advantage of the times and with her winning combination of intellect, high-low tastes, outsider status (who became an insider almost on an anthropological quest), strategic business acumen and political savvy put Vanity Fair back on the map.
Brown is the first to admit that these diaries are not an analysis of the time “Let me forewarn. These were years spent amid the moneyed elite of Manhattan and LA and the Hamptons in the overheated bubble of the world’s glitziest, most glamour-focused publishing company, Condé Nast, during the Reagan era.”
At first the overwhelming sense one gets on reading these diaries is sheer exhaustion. As Brown says “Today, when most of the time I yearn to be under my duvet at night bingeing on Netflix’s latest noir heart-pounder, I am blown away by the sheer number of dinners, galas and cocktail parties I attended as editor in chief of Vanity Fair. The social energy of the eighties was ferocious.”
But this volume is more than a recitation of who had dinner where and how the seating arrangements might have caused umbrage, it’s about a woman, Brown, who arrived with a sense of herself and an ambition to take on a world completely new to her.
Given her enormous success as a storied editor you may not be surprised to hear that as a young girl she bounced from school to school because of her “crimes of attitude.” But you might be surprised to read this entry from 1983, still unsure whether she would get the Vanity Fair job “I feel pathetic. No man would have fled town with a prospective editorship on the table. It wasn’t so much the job itself that scared me as New York. I could be eaten alive in a place where I don’t know anybody or know where the alliances are.”
She saw the terrain, she assessed it and she conquered it, turning around Vanity Fair and along the way winning friends, critics, but above all success. She understood the zeitgeist and she understood that all of us, even those of us who think of ourselves as highbrow, love gossip, intrigue and things that are popular. Her partnership with extraordinary photographers like Annie Leibovitz emerged as one of the keys to VF’s success. The most famous might have been the cover photo of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore. The stories of how such iconic photos came about are fascinating to read, including a dancing Nancy and Ronald Reagan, and a kiss that ignited the world.
Her ability to understand the times and what would work was uncanny but she took a lot of flak for it “I’m sick of people writing about the “buzz” I “create” with Vanity Fair. Buzz sounds like something grafted on, something fake and manufactured. It’s a put-down, a dismissal of impact, a way to minimize ability to identify stories people want to read and talk about. They call it “buzz.” I call it engagement. I feel a nagging sense this “buzz” bullshit would not keep being said about a male editor.”
The evolution of Tina Brown as successful editor is an object lesson for any woman who is trying to make her way in a man’s world. She was able to stake her claim, and ultimately be handsomely rewarded for the success she brought to the magazine. It’s hard to remember now how revolutionary that was at the time. Particularly for a woman who was married to an immensely successful husband, she was her own woman as far as her professional standing was concerned.
She was also self-aware enough to understand that this is what she wanted, the breakneck speed of her life, the constant demands, the hobnobbing they were the fuel that drove her, even as she takes respite occasionally curled under a quilt in her den at her weekend house. “The thought of the city gives me herpes of the brain. The hairdressing, the breakneck showers. The seething limo rides! The shouting over noisy restaurants! The ceaseless clamor of thirsty egos! The umbrage and dudgeon and fencing and foiling. And yet, I know if I left all I’d want is to get it back.”
Tina Brown doting mother and wife is also a side of her that hasn’t got much notice in coverage of her and I particularly appreciated learning about her own trials and tribulations as a working wife and mother, the scary birth of her first child and his developmental challenges and the inevitable stresses of two career parents. No matter how successful you are the rules are different for women (and continue to be). But I, for one, am inspired by her single-minded focus in barreling through and getting what she deserved.
These are takeaways from the book that many might not be expecting. But the best reason to spend time with this book is to marvel at her razor sharp observations of the people and the times, some of which are particularly prescient now. Her fame as an editor sometimes obscures the fact that she is an immensely gifted reporter and writer, as evidenced in her book The Diana Chronicles. She uses every dinner, gala, lunch and event as an opportunity for observation, and her British sense of drollness and straightforwardness just adds to the fun.
On Hollywood stars on Broadway: Unlike the muted smiles of British audiences at the National Theatre if a play has had good reviews, here if there’s a celebrity actor in the part, the whole audience goes batshit when he or she appears onstage, applauding at every other line and standing up yelling for encores.”
On Ronald Reagan: I’ve never much liked Reagan, but when I look at these pictures I have to admit he has the gift of instinctive collusion between imagery and national mood. And Nancy is critical to it. She is his joy gene.
On Donald Trump: Read and extracted Donald Trump’s autobiography, The Art of the Deal, which has a crassness I like. In the end the only thing about self-serving books like this is, do they capture the true voice?...it feels, when you have finished it, as if you’ve been nose to nose for four hours with an entertaining con man and I suspect the American public will like nothing better.
The Vanity Fair Diaries is a real time chronicle into a particular time in American history and lucky for the reader this particular diarist is a wonderful chronicler.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 419 pages
Genre: Diary/Memoir
Themes: publishing, fame, 1980’s, work, women, business
Commitment: Breezy, but insightful. The kind of thing you can dip into and get lost in, we all need a break like this every now and then.
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