Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries is catnip for a certain kind of reader. This gossipy chronicle describes the infamous editor’s rise to power during the mid-80s glory days of Condé Nast. There are Manhattan power lunches and cocktails with Warren Beatty. There are “wonderful parties” thrown by the Clurmans. It’s Succession meets The Bold Type. And frankly? Very fun to read.
Though the abundance of proper nouns suggests Ms. Brown did imagine this journal might see the light of day, there’s so much media tea in these pages that a primer seems in order. Here are a few key takeaways.
She was once in the out-crowd.
While editing Vanity Fair, Brown nurtured visionaries like André Leon Talley and Annie Lebowitz. But as an aspiring playwright at Oxford, she was put on her back foot by a “twenty three year old literary lothario” named…Martin Amis.
She also met with Hollywood with a foot in her mouth. “Everyone at the party was so famous but unfortunately I had never heard of them. I said to Shirley MacLaine, ‘What do you do?’ She gave me a manic, hostile stare and went on talking to Ed Epstein about how he should research a book about flying saucers.”
She’s dramatic by temperament.
But in this way (alone?), relatable. From an early scene in a New York apartment: “Life is unmanageable. My oven has a cockroach in it.”
She knows her way around a bon mot.
“The only reason I go out is observation greed.”
“Gossip is a kind of addiction like overeating or drinking”
Brown may also have anticipated the term “mansplaining” with her phrase, “New York finger.” That’s when “some media big-shot comes over and stabs me in the chest with a big meaty finger and says, ‘What YOU should do is hire Norman Mailer.’”
She’s queen of the pithy, ruthless take-down.
On an underwhelming Molly Ringwald cover shoot: “Newsstands needs bad boys and women with a past, not drippy starlets with pious causes.”
Julian Schnabel “floated like some predatory starfish…”
The owner of Sotheby’s is a “huge halitotic dolphin.”
A Bloomingdales heiress has “the wind tunnel look of a recent face lift.”
“I am in awe of Gloria [Steinem] but feel she underestimates me. More bristly than sisterly, I have to say, though I like her laconic sense of humor.”
“I found Philip Roth a bit of a disappointment at our dinner last night for Helmut Newton…in reality he’s like an accountant.”
“I firmly believe that Warhol, along with Roy Cohn, was one of the two most amoral men of our times…the manipulative void, the dead star.”
“The two other guests were Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, who I find are always a struggle.”
But the shade went both ways.
Jamaica Kincaid once called her “Joseph Stalin in high heels.”
Before My Dinner with Andre, there was My Drink With Wally.
“I went for a drink at the Algonquin with Wallace Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker’s son, who I have been told wants to write. I loved his creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes. He’s like a small, anxious hippo, so full of quotable insights. ‘American has no memory,’ he explained. ‘Nothing LEADS to anything in New York.’”
She was sometimes on the right side of history.
“Mort Zuckerman said that “Nora Ephron should hand over the screenplay of Heartburn to somebody else and ‘let her anger at Carl Bernstein go.’ I don’t think I agree.”
“Whatever the Reagan administration promised was supposed to trickle down hasn’t.”
As a witness of the AIDS crisis, Brown marked the plague with righteous fury. On her late friend Patrick Kelly: “I grieve that so many bright lights like Patrick…continue to be stolen from us by AIDS. It’s not only a heartbreaking loss but more depletion of talent, more decimation of creativity that’s going to have an unimaginable impact on the future of taste.”
And other times…not.
Trump features frequently. Brown green-lit an Ivana profile, and found the man’s bluster charming. Our girl also attended a surprising number of dinner parties with the Kissingers.
On a personal level, Brown had some Lucille Bluth tendencies. “Si warned me that once I sampled it, I’d never want to travel any other way than on a private plane, and how right he was.”
“Of course the chintz glory of Grey Gardens made me itch to get started on decorating Quogue.”
Underneath the name-dropping, there are flashes of insight and wisdom.
“I have been experiencing the endless round of black-tie dinners and openings as a trivial sidebar to the main event. But now it seems at this moment that they are the main event, central to understanding how money moves around and why.”
Brown on the Met Gala: “This is the moment when the social energy of the city…metastasizes, when individual crassness and need are absorbed into the bedazzled, glory-seeking hum of ‘look at me, I’m alive!’”
