Brit Editrix Takes Her Licks
Written: Jun 19 '02 (Updated Jun 19 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Made of nondigestible paper products. Consume with Beano.
Cons: Life is short. Read Chicken Soup for the Besieged Enron Executive instead.
The Bottom Line: Much more interesting and better written analyses of Tina can be found in the Salon archives. Still, if you've nothing better to do, this book is better than gonorrhea.
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| Lobstergirl's Full Review: Tina & Harry Come To America :Tina Brown Books |
If you travel in media circles, follow the Zeitgeist, or consider yourself moderately well read, it's been hard to turn around these last few years without bumping elbows with someone who had something nasty to say about Tina Brown. Brown is the British expatriate occasionally praised, but more frequently excoriated, for changing the culture at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, before being given the reins of her very own magazine Talk and driving it into the ground. She almost singlehandedly introduced the idea of celebrity "buzz" into the world of written media, transforming staid literary powerhouses into magazines that weren't afraid of mixing some Hollywood buttkissing and embarrassing photo spreads of starlets in with their book reviews and exposes of Central American despots.
Tina and Harry Come to America, by Vanity Fair contributing editor Judy Bachrach, is the first biography of the media powermonger (though Bachrach weaves in the story of Tina's husband Harry Evans in order to invoke the synergy between the two, it is mostly, and necessarily so, the story of Tina). As biographies go, it's a bantamweight, fluffy and more than a little insipid, leavened with sometimes catty gossip and possibly apocryphal behind the scenes stories. You wonder how much of the narrative is motivated by distaste or revenge on the part of Bachrach and her many co-conspirators. You wonder, but ultimately you don't care.
The book's photos of Tina as an Oxford undergraduate show a plain, blond, large-nosed, bosomy girl with giant glasses. "She was lumpy, exactly like Princess Diana was," remembered a boyfriend. Her lumpiness did not preclude a voracious sexual appetite and a passel of sexual conquests, but everyone agreed she quickly sniffed out who was important and who wasn't, and her romances soon excluded those destined for obscurity. Within a year she was dating the 38 year old Dudley Moore, then at the height of his fame, followed by Auberon Waugh, son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, and Martin Amis, son of novelist Kingsley Amis. Moore, her confidants reported, had one leg shorter than the other, and Waugh washed frequently after sex. (Clearly, an anomaly in 70's Britain.) Soon she embarked on an affair with the married movie and TV director Tony Palmer. One gets the sense that all these relationships overlapped; I tried to create a timeline, but it got too crowded.
At Oxford Tina was viewed as a social climber, extremely ambitious, but hampered somewhat by her Jewish roots (her mother was half Jewish) from gaining access to the most exclusive, Waspy circles. One old friend remarked that Tina was a "total outsider. Someone with her nose pressed against the windowpane. She is to journalism what Barbra Streisand is to movies." She threw frequent parties, leading newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair to mention many years later at a party Tina threw in his honor that in his Oxford days, an invitation from Tina was a sign that one had truly arrived. "I know this," he said, "because I never received one."
She became the features editor of the campus magazine, and had a play produced in London's West End. A good writer in those early years, she nevertheless had her career nudged along with the help of Waugh's and Amis's connections, wangling some assignments from Amis's employer the New Statesman. She appeared with impressive cleavage in the British Cosmopolitan, opposite the equally ambitious Cambridge student Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Huffington). Amis dumped Tina just before her final exams, breaking her heart, but they remained friends and mutual admirers (Talk Miramax Books recently published his autobiography and a hefty collection of his essays).
At age 21, Tina began an affair with the diminutive, thin-lipped Harry Evans, the editor of the well respected Sunday Times, married, a father of three, and 25 years her senior. Evans had established his journalistic balls by leading a crusade against the marketer of the birth defects inducing drug thalidomide, coincidentally his newspaper's largest advertiser, in a country with no First Amendment where publishers were frequently slapped with libel suits. Evans played Ping-Pong with two dinner plates instead of a paddle.
Harry loved his wife and family and was wracked by guilt over what he'd done, but he'd always had an eye for the ladies and was ultimately too overwhelmed and flattered by Tina's attentions to resist her. One by one, Tina dropped her other boyfriends. Tina and Harry lived together for six years, with Tina growing increasingly anxious. She wanted marriage and children. Finally in 1982 they flew to the U.S., ostensibly for a vacation. Harry planned a wedding ceremony at the East Hampton estate of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and proposed to Tina only 24 hours beforehand. Bradlee was best man and guests included Lauren Bacall, Nora Ephron, and publishing billionaire Mort Zuckerman.
After reinvigorating the moribund high society rag Tatler by publishing the likes of Christopher Hitchens and featuring Brooke Shields on the cover, Tina (now 30) was lured across the pond by Conde Nast to take over the editorship of Vanity Fair, then a sedate periodical with black and white covers of Philip Roth and Susan Sontag taken with a pore-cam. "Intellectuals should be read and not seen," Tina decreed, immediately recruiting Daryl Hannah and Joan Collins for subsequent covers. Jeff Bridges was rejected as a cover story when Tina deemed him too fat. On one occasion she pulled Ellen Barkin off the cover for Gorbachev, who was generating more buzz at the moment.
VF's emphasis on art and literature quietly vanished in Tina's tenure, although she commissioned Isaac Bashevis Singer to write a story for the Christmas 1985 issue. Singer's story apparently came back too abbreviated for her taste; she scrawled "Beef it up, Singer" in red on the manuscript, forcing her arts editor to explain that as Singer was a Nobel laureate in literature he might be less than willing to take up her suggestion. After Tina published a slavishly devotional piece on the Reagans by William F. Buckley, Jr., columnist Alexander Cockburn declared the entire issue "repulsive…..what the New Yorker would look like if it were edited in Los Angeles." Writers at VF weren't expected just to write; Tina expected them to attend as many parties and social events as possible to network and brush shoulders with celebrities.
Usually, though, Tina was ordering pieces slimmed down rather than beefed up. Martin Amis's pieces for VF were cut -- one on Brian De Palma by 75%, another on Hugh Hefner completely.
At TNY one writer's articles, which had been published previously at 35,000 words, were cut down to 10,000-12,000 words, until that seemed too long and the decree came down for 5,000 words. [As a point of reference, this review has 3,219 words.]
As articles got shorter, the pay from Si Newhouse's deep pockets got higher. By the end of the 80's, VF was paying $25,000 for longer articles and giving $100,000-150,000 contracts to favored writers, much higher pay than at magazines like New York and Rolling Stone. At TNY, Richard Reeves was paid $50,000 for a piece on the Clinton presidency that was ultimately killed; Gay Talese received at least that much for another spiked article on John Wayne Bobbitt. Favored writers like Ken Auletta received contracts of $200,000 plus. But money wasn't spent only on writers and parties. When a messenger stole a young assistant editor's Chanel handbag at VF, Tina had it replaced within a few hours. It wasn't unusual for $1,000 to be spent on a gift for an employee. Even underlings would receive $100 worth of exotic flowers on their birthdays.
As Tina became more famous, Harry seemed to recede into the background. Readers of VF's sycophantic 1985 Princess Diana issue may have noticed that Tina's descriptions of Diana's marriage bore an uncanny resemblance to Tina's own: "The debonair Prince is parsley-whipped from here to eternity…[forced edit mine]...a curious reversal has taken place in the marriage: Diana the shy introvert, unable to cope with public life, has emerged as the star of the world's stage." Diana even bore a physical resemblance to Tina. And like Charles, Harry occasionally sought comfort in the arms of other women. As editor of Conde Nast Traveler he began an affair with a fact checker named Sheri de Borchgrave, divorced from a baron. Borchgrave soon went to VF, but was fired for a fact-checking error.
Mostly, though, Harry just flirted or sexually harassed. Bachrach relates a 1985 lunch Harry had with a female journalist he had just met (the way she tells the story, I suspect the journalist may be Bachrach herself). "You know you're a very attractive woman, very, very attractive woman," Harry said, leaning across the table.
"Thanks," said the reporter. "It's certainly good to hear that when you're a month and half pregnant, as I am."
Harry didn't flinch, but announced that his wife was pregnant too, and began to talk about Tina's painful nipples.
One young female writer pitching a book idea at Random House soon found Harry looking up her knee-length skirt and remarking how attractive she was. Yet, by all accounts Harry was a good father to his two small children by Tina. If either of them could be called primary caretaker, it was Harry. And in spite of his affair(s), their marriage was solid, even old-fashioned, more dependent on loyalty, common interests, affection, and mutual admiration than romantic ideals.
Bachrach has solicited a surprising number of observations on the editrix's personal appearance. Unsurprisingly, they're mostly catty. "Tina would go into the ladies' room and not close the door," recalled one VF writer. She's a little "spacey…not all that comfortable socially." Another staffer recalled Tina wearing her raincoats inside out. Employees would observe the same dress worn two or three days in a row. One advertising client noticed Tina's unshaven legs under stockings; a guest at a conference noted that her hose and shoes were "secretarial pink -- no visual appetite." Even when she spent thousands on her outfits, there was often something not quite right. At an Academy Awards lunch in a pink Chanel suit, Tina had to be informed that she still had foil on her buttons from the dry cleaners. (Frankly, these are more humanizing quirks than legitimate faux pas; wouldn't everyone despise her more if she were chic on top of everything else?)
In 1992, Tina was awarded the editorship of the New Yorker, another Conde Nast property, much to the surprise of Graydon Carter, who thought he had been in negotiations with the Conde Nast chieftains. Instead, Carter was handed the reins of Vanity Fair, "a prospect he regarded with genuine revulsion." At TNY, "the writers shuddered….was the exquisite repository of fiction and thoughtfully crafted non-fiction articles doomed to an eternity of naked and pregnant Demi Moores and quotations from Brad Pitt?" Well, pretty much. "All sorts of writers of demonstrable talent and intellect found themselves pressed into the service of celebrity.…Salman Rushdie gamely poured forth more verbiage about Diana. John Seabrook consented to write about Hollywood mogul David Geffen." Mark Singer, though, could not bring himself to write about celebrity hairdresser Frederic Fekkai, nor could he stomach Ted Turner or Karl Lagerfeld. Finally, having run out of excuses, he found himself writing a piece on Heidi Fleiss.
Tina's most ill-advised and widely mocked foray into celebrity journalism was the recruitment of Roseanne as contributing editor and consultant on a special New Yorker issue about women, which resulted in the resignations of writers Ian Frazier and Jamaica Kincaid. Tina and a group of staffers flew to the west coast to meet with Roseanne, Carrie Fisher, and feminist theorist Mary Daly. They would all listen as Roseanne riffed or ranted on some issue, and then Tina would murmur, "yes, but how are we going to turn this into an article?"
Tina dumped some longstanding, respected writers. Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew, "famous for her sonorous, implacably earnest political commentary", was shown the door. Yet "sometimes Tina would 'forget' she disliked a writer, one employee observed. At one meeting she decided "we need more coverage of Washington. Shall we call Elizabeth Drew?" We said, "Tina, you let her go." "
People soon began to grumble about a British invasion at TNY. Old Oxford friends Martin Amis and Julian Barnes became staples. Alexander Chancellor was hired to edit "The Talk of the Town" over his protestations that he knew nothing about New York.
Depending on which way the buzz was blowing, Tina often changed her mind on a sudden whim. Writer Bryan Di Salvatore remembers pitching a story idea to Tina about a closed, right-wing, potentially violent Montana group called the Constitutionalists. The group refused to recognize federal currency and lived in a paramilitary-like state of paranoia. In 1994 he received the go-ahead and a $1,000 advance. After four months of intense research, Tina pulled the plug because she found the story suddenly boring. Di Salvatore was upset: "My people, they weren't sexy. Nobody had ever heard of them." In April 1995, after Timothy McVeigh blew up 168 people, the "subterranean world of the extreme right wing" was suddenly sexy. "You're a marvelous writer, marvelous. Love your stuff," Tina exclaimed to Di Salvatore, imploring him to cover the subject again.
Andrew Sullivan, the publicly gay, Catholic former editor of The New Republic, tells the story on his eponymous website of how Tina called him to write a piece for a special New Yorker issue on religion. "Dick Avedon is photographing several religious figures and icons, and I wondered whether you could do an accompanying essay," Tina asked. "About what?" asked Sullivan. "Religion is a pretty big topic." "Oh, that would be up to you," Tina replied. "Anything that's hot right now in religion. Anything hot."
"The storyline for [William] Shawn was 'Reclusive Genius, Friend of Writers'," said an early ally of Tina's. "The storyline for Tina was 'Vulgarian, Lowering Standards.'" How could the New Yorker hold onto its dignity when the likes of Sharon Stone threw a hissy fit and stormed out of a Richard Avedon photo shoot? At all three magazines, Tina would allow a star's agent to dictate the terms of an interview -- camera lens, quotes used. Bachrach astutely notes that beginning with Vanity Fair, "Tina's pioneering concessions to Hollywood…would eventually set the stage for the even more egregious courtier magazines that followed," like In Style.
A startling tsunami of criticism broke in 1996 when disgraced former Clinton adviser Dick Morris was invited to a TNY breakfast to attract advertisers. It was a hideous union -- the vulgar, treacherous toady (Morris had sucked a prostitute's toes for $200 an hour and allowed her to eavesdrop on a conversation with the President) and the venerable old periodical. At Random House, in a burst of syzygy, Harry paid $2.5 million for Morris's memoirs. It was nothing new; the same writers were often published by both.
More and more "Tina found herself identifying with Hillary Clinton and her travails. It wasn't simply the imperfections of marriage that united them, although here Tina clearly empathized. It was the animosity -- cataclysmic in its ease of ignition -- that both women managed almost effortlessly to arouse." Yet Hillary Clinton, nonempathetically, would supposedly call Tina "the junk food of journalism." (Completing the circle, Andrew Sullivan in the Wall Street Journal called Tina "the Bill Clinton of the magazine trade….if you asked yourself of Ms. Brown, as of Mr. Clinton, what exactly did she stand for….what, beneath all the skill and spin and buzz, was irreducibly her, you'd end up scratching your head.")
Unable to make TNY profitable (although she had increased circulation and ad pages), Tina left to start Talk, a joint venture with film studio Miramax. By her side was former VF publisher Ron Galotti, the model for 'Mr. Big' in Sex and the City. Some, including new TNY editor David Remnick, were peeved by Tina's choice of a name. It seemed to have been stolen from "Talk of the Town", TNY's best known feature. From the outset, Talk was hampered by self-imposed handicaps. The first was its size -- it was an oversized magazine, which had proved to be a disaster with earlier magazines like Allure "because it cost $7,000 extra per advertising page to make film that unique size." Also, the only way to position an oversized magazine on a newsstand was to pay the newsstand dealer extra. Talk's sell-through rate -- the number of copies actually purchased off the newsstand -- was just under 19 percent, half the industry average.
More importantly, Talk didn't seem to know what its mission was, nor could Tina articulate it. " "Talk is a cultural search engine," Tina would babble. It was hard to tell what that meant. "Heat is quality," she informed a reporter, before swiftly retracting: "No, quality is heat." " Sometimes it seemed to be a Clinton fanzine, with Hillary featured in the inaugural issue, Chelsea adding her thoughts on the events of 9/11, and George Stephanopolous an early writer. Tina captured the "buzz" with a cover of Miramax starlet Gwyneth Paltrow in black leather underwear, but then proved herself culturally tone deaf with subsequent covers of Elizabeth Taylor and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sometimes she appeared to be stuck in a time warp with her enthusiasm for 80's icons like Demi Moore and Daryl Hannah.
Talk began to be mocked for being in in-house organ of Miramax. After four issues, the New York Times noted, of 22 articles "written by people in the film industry or about people or characters in the film industry, 11 featured people recently or currently affiliated with Miramax or Disney projects." "…they should just call it Miramax magazine," said one Talk defector."
Bachrach sums up its dilemma well: "Talk was by no means the only publication that indulged in unblushing and mirthless treatments of potentates and stars. Under Graydon Carter, VF's Hollywood coverage could certainly be laudatory. In Style was famous for acts of reverence toward those who consented to drop into its pages. The difference here lay in each magazine's pretensions. In Style had none. VF offered monthly penance for its star profiles in the form of stories, columns, and investigations where all bets were off and certain verities -- ugly ones at times -- were exposed. Talk, on the other hand, didn't seem to be able to come to terms with the identity fashioned by its own creator. It was, Tina insisted at the outset, nothing less than "very eclectic and, you know, in depth at the same time…" And yet with each succeeding issue that depth eroded and critical analysis was held in abeyance."
This book was published before the January 2002 demise of the widely unread Talk, but you get the sense that Bachrach saw it coming, or at least hoped for it. She was far from alone. Gavin McNett wrote in Salon in February 2000: "Of course, Brown, while evil, is probably human, and is now failing safely downward with her own hypermeretricious Talk magazine, rather than upward by wrecking other people's perfectly good magazines." But don't look for Tina Brown to stay down, or quiet, forever. She has reportedly been keeping detailed diaries since her teens, she's certainly entitled to a deep well of animus, and she's still got a lot of friends in the publishing business.
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