Tina Brown was only in her twenties when she left her job at Tatler magazine in London and flew across to New York City to become the editor of Vanity Fair magazine.
Her diaries dated between 1983 and 1992 follow her journey as she works her way into upper class New York social circles, attends over-the-top glamorous parties, and transforms the flailing magazine into sales record numbers all while juggling touchy egos, a ridiculous schedule and a growing family.
Partway through reading this book, I noticed some common themes. Most of the content can be broken into the following categories: London vs. NYC; Girl Power; Balancing Family & Work Life/Mom Guilt; Opulence; and The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same. There are so many quotable quotes and tons of firsthand celebrity scoops. Because I was only a schoolgirl during this era, I don't recognize many of the names, though there are definitely many that I do know - enough to make it interesting. I'm sure if you know more of the references, this would be an even juicier read. Most of the diaries are concentrated into the opulent 1980s, while the 90s entries are less detailed.
Tina Brown has the most quotable quotes, so here are some of the most prominent observations from her crazier-than-fiction diaries from the woman herself:
London vs. NYC:
- "Here [in the States], time is to be spent, like money; time is to be killed, time is to be forgotten. Everything is a race against time. Trying to beat it is the pressure at your throat. I dream of London's manageable scale, its compactness, its conversation. America is too big, too rich, too driven. America needs editing."
- "I had forgotten how terrifyingly tough NYC is, what an hourly battering it is to stay on top. I was in such a sensitive mood that I felt I had gone out stark naked."
- "America, as with everything else, makes you more professional about entertaining. In London we just threw fun parties. Here one sees what works and formats it, so that each dinner is the dress rehearsal for the next one."
Girl Power:
- "Big blowup with John Halpern because I don't like his Jessica Lange piece after all the agony it was to secure it. The piece has too much of him, not enough her, and he doesn't want to revise it at all or report additional material, which pissed me off. It was so difficult telling him and he seemed to deliberately make it harder and more personal...I felt the resentment of a man being criticized by a woman."
- "At the apartment closing, aside from our lawyer...all the other legal eagles were women in their thirties...Looking at all these tense New York women, a little frayed, a little underpaid, enough to keep them hooked on their career path but not enough to finance escape, I felt they are the new prisoners of the American dream, always working harder than the guys and dealing and redealing the paperwork.
- "Because of the Gulf War, the plane was entirely empty except for Barbara Walters. That was a girl-power statement. Everyone else chickened out of flying, but we didn't. She was going over to get some scoop interview. There is a reason she is on top."
- "But as soon as I saw that warm, golden image of the utterly naked, enormously pregnant, totally glorious Demi [Moore], I knew this was the shot we had to have. I felt retrospectively liberated from a long 1990 trying to hide the expanding Izzy, the vicarious shout of joy showing Demi's bump to the world. Women need this, dammit!"
Balancing Family & Work Life/Mom Guilt:
- "I AM SO HAPPY. My first panicked worry was that I could never handle motherhood and the mag in current mode. But now that I know it's going to happen, I suddenly see it as THE PERFECT TIME."
- Working through the premature birth of her son: "With my neurotic moralizing streak I see what's happened as a punishment for surfeit of thoughtless success. So you think you're going to romp through motherhood, too, huh? Try this on for size! Remember pain and grief and failure? Here's a refresher course."
- "My eyes burn with the stress of a day that begins at six, doing crunches with the thunder-thighed trainer, followed by an hour gurgling with G, an hour blowing out hair and getting dressed for the office, and then it's race race race to get through the day and home by five to walk G in his stroller and play with him (it's so damn tough to make the power woman-to-mommy switch), then on to his bathtime and dosh up for one of the innumerable place-card dinners raining down."
- "I retreat to Quogue [their summer house] to think about it all. The power life roars along with all real thoughts, fears buried or put indefinitely on hold. I want more time to contemplate, but I can't seem to live any other way. I feel panic when I stop. I am an action junkie. My best hope for peace is when I'm with G."
- While on maternity with her second child, Izzy: "It's heavenly to be around my home, however chaotic, instead of racing out with a pile of manuscripts spilling out of my bag. Heavenly to take my own children to the pediatrician instead of calling the doctor from the office for an update."
- While determining her son has special needs: "If only he had come to full term. Was it my fault for working too hard and too long? I worry so much about what cruel world has in store when he has so many challenges."
- "The Bermuda phone was red-hot with press calls from London. I tried to get Harry [her husband] out of the ocean to advise me, but he had just been stung by a jellyfish. To my consternation I could view him from the porch, peeing on his own leg, while Izzy screamed from her stroller on the deck, Georgie was drubbing me about going to the beach, and the credibility of the magazine's reporting was imploding on the other side of the Atlantic."
Opulence:
- "Jayne Wrightsman, apparently, gave the Kissingers a tractor for Christmas for their house in Connecticut. She also buys four sets of Bulgari earrings at twenty-five thousand dollars a throw for each of her girlfriends."
- "Went to Malcolm Forbes' birthday on board his party yacht The Highlander. First regroup of power people after the summer and it was interesting to see them all refreshed from their Hamptons and Mediterranean renewal sojourns, women thinned down and younger, achieved in secret weeks at spas and clinics, men shiny and complacent from planning takeovers by the pool...There were delicious moments such as when Malcolm's son, Steve, landed on the boat in a helicopter. We all went onto the upper deck to watch it come in, our hair whipped by its landing."
- "We shared a car to Trump Tower with Barbara Walters, after another holiday bash. Barbara told me she was planning to go home in between and change out of her five-thousand-dollar Galanos cocktail dress into something "more formal with serious jewels because Ivana is sure to be dressed up."
- Pat Buckley to Bill Blass: "I am trying out this new Sauternes but it's not nearly as nice as the one you serve." "I'll send you over a case," said Blass, and to me: "One of the nicest things about being as rich as I am is the ability to make these kinds of grand gestures."
- "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."
The AIDS Crisis:
- "I assigned a piece for the March issue on the toll of AIDS on the arts and fashion. No one has yet gathered up a gallery of faces of all those who have died and denuded us of their talent, and we have done it in a haunting double-page spread. I asked our new hire Michael Schnayerson...to report it out. He's a young straight guy who lives in the West Village and who until this assignment was oblivious to AIDS. Now, reporting the piece, he says it's been like stepping into a war zone...Collecting the pictures of the people who have died has been a real challenge. So many were in the closet or didn't want anyone to know they died from AIDS, or had hidden it from their families. Is it appropriate to run these pictures?"
- "Stricken to learn that the fashion designer Patrick Kelly has died of AIDS. He was only thirty-five!...I grieve that so many bright lights like Patrick, one by one, continue to be stolen from us by AIDS."
- "Today I had a tragic meeting with the young editor Duncan Stalker...I rehired him as senior editor in November...knowing he was HIV positive but hoping for the best. Now he came to tell me he has been going through hell with his dying boyfriend and feels he can't cope anymore and has to quit. I felt stricken as I looked at him. He's suddenly pale and insubstantial. His head has become a strange bulbous shape and his shoulders look as if they could crumple like paper. I told him he could be paid for as long as...And both our eyes filled with tears. Duncan, this promising young editor of thirty-two, began to speak of himself in the past tense."
- "A memorial service at St. Bart's Church for Malcolm Forbes. Another nineties cataclysm - all the great movers and shakers are going down. It was very sudden, and there are whispers of suicide because of illness. And there is only one illness that people whisper about, and that is AIDS. Could Malcolm have decided he couldn't face being outed at last? He was of a generation that couldn't bear it, and always feigned masculinity so strenuously, with the gruff voice and motorbikes. It would have been so great if he could have declared the truth and turned away the shame so many others feel, too, but he chose this way instead. Or that's how I read it."
The More Things Change...:
Social isolation:
- Just swap out the eighties technology for cell phones and nothing much has changed: "Schiff has done a great essay in the mag on the Particle People, which we're all becoming - splintered apart by the inequity of wealth...the youth boom, the changing demographics, isolated by our camcorders and fax machines and home computer modems on the desk."
Donald Trump:
- About his book, The Art of the Deal: "...there is something authentic about Trump's bullshit. Anyway, 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."
- "My Italian dinner partner and Tina Chow on the other side of him listened with mounting disgust as I bounced it back and forth with Trump over the artichoke and shrimp. "You see this man, Trump," hissed the Italian on the other side of me. "He is trying to force you to think like him, and I think it's working."
- About a magazine article Vanity Fair was featuring about Donald and Ivana Trump: "We wanted to capture their fascinating repositioning now that they are divorcing and Ivana has been upgraded to superstar victim of a brutish, philandering husband, which she is playing to the hilt...Marie [the article writer] has been able to establish such a pattern of lying and loudmouthing in Trump that it's incredible he still prospers and gets banks to loan him money. Great quote where his brother said Donald was the kid who threw cake at the birthday party. He's like some monstrous id creation of his father, a cartoon assemblage of all his worst characteristics mixed with the particular excesses of the new media age...The revelation that he has a collection of Hitler's speeches at the office is going to make a lot of news."
Work life invading personal downtime:
- "I commissioned a piece for fall from Tony Schwartz...about the new, unmanageable pace of life. I am calling it "Acceleration Syndrome." Car phones and call waiting and home faxes are making everything so revved up. Tony's done great interviews with people like Bob Pittman, who intends to purchase a portable phone so he has no dead time walking between appointments, and a USA Today exec who takes a tape recorder for dictation to the pool. Great interview with Don Simpson about his exhaustive magazine reading list he's devouring while also watching TV."
Fighting for equal pay/feminism:
- At breakfast with literary agent Morton Janklow: "Sees Hearst as I do - a sleeping beauty...was shocked by what I am paid (now $225,000) comparative to other reps, especially when I told him that a month ago Dick Snyder had ruminated to Ed Victor about the S and S [Simon & Schuster] job that pays a lot more. Agrees with me completely that in an era when magazines are changing hands for as much as 15- mil, we need to explore all with Bennack, and then talk to Si [Tina's boss]."
- "Back came a nice note mentioning financial "participation" in future success, something Si would never, ever do because of the wholly owned family situation. I would so much rather have stock options, or phantom stock (I am learning a lot from Mort), than perks and lifestyle treats. With phantom stock, a future payday tied to the performance of the magazine could turn out to be extremely valuable, especially if he ever sells it."
- After Vanity Fair won a major magazine award: "Si was flushed with pride: "I can leave now, Tina. I am so thrilled." But how thrilled? I wish he would show real trust and give me some stake in the ongoing success. It would mean more to me than any raise."
- After finally getting the pay raise she worked hard for: "I felt the thrill of the big time...I left Mort's office in an altered state...So this is the day I will never forget as long as I live, the day I made my quantum leap. The day I joined the boys club...I already felt something new - a more independent woman. A confidence that wasn't here before. Thanks to Mort, five years in I am now paid six hundred thousand dollars a year on a three-year contract with a million-dollar bonus at the end, plus my parents taken care of and no debt on our apartment...It feels good that I got it through hard work, strong nerves, careful strategy, and an eye to the future. Those crazy dinner parties where the game of money and value is vociferously discussed by the men turned out to be my listening tour of the way deals get done."
Influencers/social media before its time:
- "The image makers are now as important as the stars themselves, and certainly more interesting. Maybe because their power is our need. The more fragmented we become as a culture, the more the media holds us together."
- After attending a birthday party for the diplomat Dick Holbrooke: "Pondering on why it was such a discomforting night: there's a new social trend that seems to be about marketing your private life. Every birthday, every anniversary, every baby shower, every wedding is just the excuse for a positioning statement."
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