The Vanity Fair Diaries Read online

  There was no foreboding of that in the summer of 1981. The royal wedding was a national expression of joy. Tatler flooded the zone in the months leading up to it with every angle, past, present, and future. Among the blizzard of pieces on her early life, Nick Coleridge contributed an extended caption masterpiece about Di’s flatmates. It began, “There are still a few girls left in Britain who haven’t been to bed with Jasper Guinness and all of them are friends of Lady Diana Spencer.” Beneath the passport-sized photo of a discreetly smiling country girl named Virginia Pitman, we ran this blurb:

  Since leaving Hatherop Castle School, a spell behind the counter at Asprey’s has been followed by a Cordon Bleu cooking course and Cooking for Directors in the City. Her goldfish, Battersea, which is cosseted between plastic weeds from Harrods, is a perennial conversation piece.

  “The goldfish,” said Miles Chapman on receipt of the copy to edit, “is fucking genius.”

  Tatler’s newsstand numbers soared. We had taken the circulation from ten thousand to one hundred thousand and become the third big British glossy, alongside Vogue and Harpers & Queen. We were in profit and prospering, a grown-up monthly coffee-table magazine with perfect binding, fat advertising, and a voice that made news. One of the innovations Miles had come up with was a line on the spine of the magazine that summarized a mood. The one for the 1981 end-of-year holiday issue was “Deeper, Crisper, Breaking Even.” As a marker of how we’d become an authority on the Big Story I was asked to coanchor the NBC Today show’s royal wedding coverage from London with Jane Pauley and Tom Brokaw.

  When the excitement was over, Gary Bogard made a big decision. He sold Tatler to Condé Nast Publications for a million pounds. It was Condé Nast’s first new magazine title in Britain in twenty-five years. The sale was final in April of 1982. We decamped from our latest Covent Garden honky-tonk outpost and took up residence at the ultimate glossy status address: Vogue House, in Hanover Square.

  It was the right move at the right moment. Yet the sale of Tatler to Condé Nast, however important for the magazine’s solidity, depressed our spirits. Gary Bogard had been the best owner anyone could wish for. Behind his reserve, he had a keen aesthetic sense, maverick business skills, a love of quality, and a love of me. The Tatler team had been ragtag renegades, flamethrowers at the black-tie balls. Now we were part of the establishment, lodged with all the other British Condé Nast publications and run by the ultimate Mayfair backslapper and man about town, Bernard Leser—a very different animal from Bogard, our beloved and clever outsider. My scrappy publisher, Tina Brooks, who had sold ads with furious upstart passion, was removed by Condé Nast in favor of a country squire wannabe in a tweed trilby hat who went fishing on weekends.

  Within eighteen months of the new American ownership the core members of my team and I were getting bored. We felt we had slowed down. We heard little from the mighty American company that had bought us outside of occasional quick visits from its small, nervous chairman, S. I. Newhouse Jr.—known as Si—who would give me ten minutes when he came through London on art-buying trips. Oh, and we kept hearing about a big glamorous project in the works in New York: the relaunching of the company’s former flagship, Vanity Fair, whose heyday was the 1920s.

  I felt the rise of envy at what such a magazine, reconceived, could be. To anyone who considered themselves, as I did, a magazine romantic, Vanity Fair represented the last word in literary prestige, social glamour, and visual ravishment. Flippant, knowing, and debonair, Vanity Fair’s voice—the most precious and elusive quality a magazine can offer its readers—was forged by its celebrated editor Frank Crowninshield, known to all as “Crownie,” whose appointment in 1914 was the inspired pick of Condé Montrose Nast (1872–1942), the dashing Casanova and publishing entrepreneur whose philosophy was “class not mass.”

  In my twenties I was given a coffee-table book that collected Vanity Fair’s iconic portraits, and I lusted for the sophisticated New York it represented. Its pages shimmered with photographs by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, and George Hoyningen-Huene and glowed with rich color plates by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Covarrubias, and Rockwell Kent. The seductiveness of the images, the lapidary sheen of the prose in Crownie’s VF spoke to me like the rising strains of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. (I especially loved the wit of Crownie’s annual In and Out gallery, titled Hall of Fame, which nominated celebrities of the time for fame or oblivion.)

  Like Keats and Shelley, Vanity Fair died young. By 1936, when Hitler marched into the Rhineland, the voice that had defined the magazine’s classic nonchalance had become its downfall. It was no longer the time for such airy contributions as a profile of Mahatma Gandhi titled “Lord of the Loin Cloth” or a picture of Mussolini next to a monkey, with the caption “In all of Italy / there’s no old meanie / who can make a monkey / of Mussolini.” To ride the zeitgeist successfully you have to know when it’s turned. A fast-paced new weekly titled The New Yorker, edited by the rough literary beast Harold Ross, had burst into bloom and was stealing Crownie’s best talent. Vanity Fair got skinnier and skinnier until Mr. Nast dealt it a hammer blow even more mortifying to Crownie than outright closure: he folded it into Vogue.

  For almost half a century Vanity Fair had slept, immured in a magazine mausoleum. Then, as the 1980s got under way, Condé Nast Magazines—now part of the publishing conglomerate of a New Jersey newspaper family, the Newhouses—spurred by Si, decided to bring it back to life. Its rebirth was heralded by a blaze of marketing hype beyond anything the magazine world had ever seen.

  Many would later argue that the excellence and ubiquity of that marketing campaign were bound to trip up the new Vanity Fair. All through 1982 the drumroll built ever more inflated expectations. Advertisements for the new Vanity Fair blazed from every major billboard. One showed the dancer Twyla Tharp leaping into the air over the single word “Breakthrough.” Another—perhaps the most notorious in the history of Vanity Fair mistakes—had a bare-chested John Irving, author of The World According to Garp, attired in red wrestling togs. The Irving image was splashed over the hubristic statement “No Contest,” followed by Vanity Fair’s logotype and the words “Coming in March 1983.”

  At the time of Vanity Fair’s relaunch, Si Newhouse, fifty-six, and eight years into holding the reins of power he took from his father, had been on an acquisition and start-up tear. Short and nebbishy, he had a charmingly awkward persona that concealed a big ambition: to establish Condé Nast as the most prestigious magazine company in the world.

  Within a year of his father’s death in 1979, Si, in rapid succession, bought the most important publishing house in America, Random House, whose imprints included Alfred A. Knopf, the prestige literary house; oversaw the successful start-up of a pioneering health and fitness magazine, Self; and bought and revamped Gentleman’s Quarterly, better known as GQ. And he was always on the lookout for more.

  Si was the aesthete in the Newhouse family. He combined an eye for business opportunity with a passion for art, design, and high gloss. Intellectually insecure, he relied on the self-confident baron of taste and flair he had inherited from his father’s circle: Alexander Liberman, Condé Nast’s editorial director. Liberman—Russian-born, like Alexey Brodovitch, his brilliant rival at Carmel Snow’s Bazaar—was a well-known, if secondary, painter and sculptor, but he was revered for his panoptic control of every title at Condé Nast. He was everything that Si was not and wanted to be: a tall, slim, effortlessly cultured homme du monde with a small, elegant mustache and a poet’s swept-back mane of salt-and-pepper hair.

  Alex became S. I. Newhouse Jr.’s mentor, introducing him to the world of art and fashion and café society over which he reigned with his stylish Russian wife, Tatiana, who made chic, much-copied hats for Saks. Alex was politically astute and, as an aficionado of turbulence, schooled in survival. His father, an economist and lumber specialist, had managed to be an adviser both to the tsar in prerevolutionary Russia and, afterward, to Lenin. Alex’s early life in S
t. Petersburg and Moscow was fraught with terror and violence. When Lenin died, the Libermans fled to Paris, where Alex first met Tatiana and helped the family’s stricken finances by working as a graphic artist and designer on the news magazine VU. They thrived there in the city’s fashionable creative milieu. Alex would later leverage his early connections there to take excellent pictures of the greatest artists of the school of Paris at work—Chagall, Picasso, Matisse. (The photographs were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 and published as a book that is still a classic, The Artist in His Studio.)

  But it was the pace, glamour, and opportunity of Manhattan, where the family fled again in 1941 after the Nazis occupied Paris, that suited Alex best of all. He loved the self-invention of New York and, perhaps because he had so many painful memories, the American refusal to look back. He was swiftly hired for the design desk of Vogue, where he caught the ever-alert eye of Mr. Nast himself. He rose and rose after that to become, at Condé Nast Publications in 1962, “the tsar of all the Russias.”

  Normally, the hiring (and firing) dynamic between Alex and Si worked uncannily well. Si loved quality, for sure, but only if it sold well. And Alex, though an artist by taste and temperament, knew how to protect and extend his power base. Yes, in the swinging sixties he had wooed Diana Vreeland away from Carmel Snow’s Bazaar and championed her throughout the eight creatively glorious years of her editorship of Vogue. But in the early seventies, when ads began to slide and the elitist irresponsibility of the previous decade was superseded by recession and earnest feminism, Alex readily agreed with Si that Vreeland had exceeded her sell-by date and it was time to deliver the coup de grâce. Her departing words were “Alex, we have all known many White Russians, and we’ve known a few Red Russians. But, Alex, you’re the only Yellow Russian I have ever known.”

  The revival of Vanity Fair in 1983 was as much a passion project for Si as it was for Alex, but for different reasons. Si had long idolized a magazine that was not for sale: The New Yorker. Under its revered second editor, William Shawn, it had for thirty-five years been the jewel in the crown of American publishing—not only the highest-quality, the most influential, and the most admired of literary magazines but also the most successful. For two decades, the prosperity and prestige of The New Yorker had made the young Mr. Newhouse sigh.

  But by 1982, The New Yorker was starting to lose ground, its readership aging every year. The cartoons were keeping it alive while the famously lengthy articles, unbroken by photographs or illustrations or display type, were moldering unread in the accumulating pile of issues in the wicker baskets by subscribers’ beds. To Si this looked like an opening. If he couldn’t have The New Yorker, maybe The New Yorker could be bested by a revived Vanity Fair. He looked around for a launch editor who had the cred to take it on, and Bob Gottlieb, his intellectual guru, whom he had picked to run Knopf, suggested Richard Locke, the nerdy, introverted deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review, known for his highbrow taste.

  Alex, meanwhile, saw VF as an opportunity to burnish his own place at the intellectual high table. At Condé Nast his power base was Vogue, where he had the last word on everything. He dominated its editor in chief, Grace Mirabella, and her features editor, the gossipy sixty-nine-year-old culture baron, Leo Lerman, but he resented that he and his art were not taken seriously enough, trivialized, he believed, by his oversight of Vogue. Hiring Locke from the Gray Lady would be a step in the right direction.

  As the new VF moved toward the deadline for its first issue, the prelaunch hype was building to a climax and premium ad pages were selling briskly. Granted, we in London occasionally heard rumors of editorial chaos from friends at Condé Nast in New York. Manuscripts and proposals were piling up unread; some talented staffers had been hired, but few had any experience with what it takes to put out a glossy commercial magazine; Locke himself seemed paralyzed with indecision. Of course, any start-up, especially one on the scale of the new VF, tends to be a scene of frenzy and conflict. But the truth is that the competing visions—of the marketing department, of Si and Alex, of Richard Locke—never came into alignment. All they had in common was that they were derivative of something better.

  Which brings us to a fateful, rainy afternoon in early February of 1983.

  A heavy envelope arrived at the offices of Tatler on the fourth floor of Vogue House. It bore a New York postmark and contained the freshly minted, still unreleased, eagerly awaited first issue of American Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair.

  I summoned Miles, Michael, Gabé, and Sarah to page through it with me, expecting to revel in wonders that would raise our own editorial game. But as we looked at it in silence, we were, as Brits like to say, gobsmacked. VF’s editors had a free hand to hire anyone in the world—any writer, any photographer, any designer. And this is what they’d done with such largesse? This flatulent, pretentious, chaotic catalog of dreary litterateurs in impenetrable typefaces? A forty-page safari through a new Gabriel Márquez novel? When the first issue broke, the scorn of the response was unanimous. Time, The New York Times, and the New Republic all put the boot in. The New Republic’s acerbic Brit, Henry Fairlie, nominated the twelve-page Ralph Lauren ad spread as the only appealing feature he could find. Everyone trashed the cacophony of the graphics.

  The entire management of Condé Nast Magazines was mortified. A party at Newhouse’s home for the staff to celebrate the publication was over and done within thirty minutes. Richard Locke went into what the staff called “bunker” mode, cowering in his office. Liberman feared that this failure could be pinned on the editorial director—i.e., himself—and started looking for a new editor to clean up fast.

  Meanwhile, in London I had grown increasingly restless at Tatler. In one of those reckless, abrupt moves I seem to be prone to making, I sent UK Condé Nast managing director Bernard Leser and Si Newhouse my letter of resignation.

  My husband was also now free. In 1981 Rupert Murdoch acquired Times newspapers from the Thomson organization. Unwisely, Harry left his successful power base at The Sunday Times, run as an entirely separate newspaper, to edit its august but ailing sister paper, The Times. He was soon in a noisy showdown with the new owner. On acquisition, Murdoch had made five promises to The Times board and the British government to respect the historic political and editorial independence of The Times. Within twelve months he had broken every one. In 1982 Harry earned twin journalistic distinctions: Britain’s Granada Television voted him editor of the year, and Murdoch fired him.

  In the meantime, my parents had left England, too, decamping to their house in the south of Spain to enjoy the bougainvillea.

  Harry started considering invitations to teach from US universities. I’d been feeling the lure of America for some time. I loved our London life together but I knew that if he was willing, I would give it all up in a heartbeat to live in New York City. The year after graduation from Oxford I had spent a thrilling three-month sojourn there, freelancing from a death therapist’s sublet in Chelsea. (I wrote a play about the experience, Happy Yellow, that was produced at the London Fringe in April 1977.) I wanted to go back to Manhattan—and conquer it. New York was the big time, the wider world, the white-hot center, and that’s where I, a girl of the arena, wanted to be.

  One evening in the spring of 1983, a call for me came through from the United States to our Ponsonby Terrace refuge. It was from Alexander Liberman. I had met this famous corporate charmer only briefly, the year before, on a visit to New York with Michael Roberts for the American fashion collections. Why was Mr. Liberman calling me now?

  The strains of Gershwin’s clarinet again began to rise in my head. A tortured, perilous courtship for the editorship of Vanity Fair was about to begin.

  1983

  DANCE WITH ME

  Sunday, April 10, 1983

  I am here in NYC at last, brimming with fear and insecurity. Getting in late last night on British Airways, I suddenly felt the enormousness of New York City, the noise of it, the speed of it, the lon
ely obliviousness of so many people trying to get ahead. My London bravado began to evaporate. I wished I was with Harry, who I knew would be sitting at his computer in front of his study window, in Kent, furiously pounding away about Rupert Murdoch.

  I am staying at the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-Fourth Street, opposite the Algonquin Hotel. It’s a bit of a fleapit but in walking distance to the Condé Nast HQ at 350 Madison Avenue. The man at the desk seemed half-asleep when I checked in and there was no one around to haul my bag to the elevator. All the way in from JFK in the taxi, a phone-in show was blaring a woman with a rasping German accent talking in excruciating detail about blow jobs. The instructions crackling from the radio to “tek it in the mouth und move it slowly, slowly up und down” got so oppressive I asked the cabdriver what the hell he was listening to. He said it was a sex therapist called Dr. Ruth who apparently gives advice on the radio and has an enormous following.

  As soon as I woke up I rushed to the newsstand on the corner to look for the April issue of Vanity Fair. The second edition is even more baffling than the first one I saw in London in February. The cover is some incomprehensible multicolored tin-man graphic with no cover lines that will surely tank on the newsstand. Some stunning photographs—they can afford Irving Penn and Reinhart Wolf, which made me pine with envy, and they don’t disappoint—but the display copy is nonexistent, so it’s not clear why they are there. There’s a brainy but boring Helen Vendler essay next to an Amy Clampitt poem, a piece headed (seriously) “What’s Wrong with Modern Conducting?” and a gassy run of pages from V. S. Naipaul’s autobiography. All this would be fine in the Times Literary Supplement, but when it’s on glossy paper with exploding, illegible graphics, it’s a migraine mag for God knows whom. Plus I learned today the Naipaul extract cost them seventy thousand dollars! That’s nearly a whole year’s budget at Tatler!