“America has no memory,” said Wallace Shawn, the actor and son of William Shawn, whose legendary editorship of the New Yorker ended four years before Tina Brown’s began – and it’s an aphorism that runs as a refrain through her Vanity Fair Diaries.
Brown’s ascent at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker is, of course, still vividly remembered – not least because some of the people she fired pop up now and then bitterly to remind us – but more generally, her account of her first decade as an editor in the US is a love letter to this idea of America: as a place where one comes to shed the inhibitions of home.
And how. Brown has been in the US for almost 30 years and although she is, she says, still “English in my sensibility”, considers herself American to the degree that she has two American children and felt the election of Trump more viscerally than Brexit.
She is also American at a sort of notional level. The Vanity Fair Diaries, Brown’s contemporaneous account of coming to New York at the age of 29 to edit and ultimately turn around Vanity Fair, is a business story, a picaresque, a story of power, money and gender politics, and, as is ever the case with Brown, a love story with her husband of 36 years, Harold Evans. It is also, perhaps, a study in how aspects of one’s nature are enabled or suppressed by the culture one lives in.
“It’s so aggressive, America,” says Brown over lunch in midtown, “or seemed so when I arrived, even though I’m a real feet-first kind of a girl.” At 64, she looks little changed from photos taken in the newsrooms of that era, her energy for the chase undimmed. “Nonetheless, I was stunned by the aggression, all these people pushing and saying you can’t succeed. I felt that the British can be polite to your face and stab you when you turn around, whereas in America people tend to be more frontal in their aggression, which in some ways was invigorating to me. I’m sometimes better under attack.”
Most of us, confronted with the ghost of our 30-year-old selves, will experience some combination of affection and horror, and I say this as someone who interviewed Brown 10 years ago and on re-reading the piece before lunch, shuddered slightly at its gratuitous rudeness.
In the Diaries, the impression Brown gives of herself in the early 1980s is of a young woman unpolished, gauche and game after the English fashion. “Hooray! I love my job!” she writes at one point (not a sentiment one can imagine David Remnick committing to his diary in quite the same style). In spite of the trail she’d blazed in London as the 25-year-old editor of Tatler, she was also comically green; the first time Si Newhouse insinuated to Brown she might have the job at Vanity Fair, she was so alarmed she bolted back to England. When she finally accepted the offer and moved to New York, her ignorance of the city made her practically a rube. (She thought breakfast “a funny time to meet,” and tried to rent an apartment by cheerfully handing over $5,000 in cash to a fake realtor.)
One of the most satisfying elements of the Diaries, therefore, is to watch the transformation not only of the magazine but of Brown herself. Now, as then, she makes no apology for her focus, which was on “the world that Vanity Fair covered, a glossy world. This was not about the other side of the Reaganomics revolution, in which some very bad stuff was happening in America. I was covering the world that glossy magazines covered, which was the movement of money, and I felt that that was a major story. And it was in the 1980s.”
For the modern reader, it was also a mine of juicy encounters with people who still have currency. Some of those whom Brown met on the 1980s party circuit fell into obscurity, but others remain relevant, and her rude assessments – of Jackie Onassis (“crazed”), Philip Roth (“like an accountant”); Boris Johnson (“odious”); and even Saint Joan (Didion), whom she has a pop at for mumbling at dinner – are delightful.
This is Brown’s favourite view, not from the outside looking in as per the reporter’s traditional role, but from the more gratifying position of a seat at the table. When I ask how she summoned the social energy for all those nights out, she says, “It wasn’t social energy, it was professional energy. I’ve always been an observer of social life, so it was strange to read that I was this queen of society, because I thought of myself as a coverer of things, as a journalist. But I understand how that doesn’t necessarily hit the eye.”
The most auspicious cameo in the book is by Donald Trump, who lumbers in and out of the frame like a mechanical monster and, as Brown wrote at the time, had about him a “crassness I like”. If there are no second acts in American lives, it is because in most circumstances you can demand a re-take on the first and Trump’s 1980s celebrity reads here as an origin story of sorts. It is also, as Brown points out, an indication of how everything and nothing has changed.
“Brexit hit me hard,” she says, “but Trump winning was even bigger, just because of the brutality of the whole message. Whatever you think about Hillary – and she was a flawed candidate, did a lot of things wrong – it was the classic thing that happens to women, which is the woman who had the most qualifications, the hardest worker, who could have hit the ground running on every aspect of policy, was beaten by a big, loud-mouthed conman. And I’m afraid that it happens a good deal.”
After nine years at Vanity Fair, Brown edited the New Yorker for six and in 1999, left Condé Nast to set up Talk magazine, the title co-owned and after three years abandoned by Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein did not take any meetings with Tina Brown in his bathrobe. (“I think the Time magazine person of the year should’ve been a bathrobe,” she says. “A bathrobe! What is it with these old men and their bathrobes? It’s insane.”) He was, however, “an abusive bully”. He screamed at her down the phone. He over-reacted to perceived criticism. I had wondered if Brown dismissed this as an act in the style, say, of a ranting British tabloid editor, but no, she says; she couldn’t shrug it off.
“It’s a natural instinct to want your boss to approve of you. So even though it enraged me, it also greatly unsettled me. I’d had a very good time in publishing with Si Newhouse [longtime owner of the New Yorker], mercurial and exasperating as he is. But he also was a man of taste and stability. He would never in a million years behave in that way.”
Brown knew Weinstein was sleazy, she says, and this week told reporters that during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential race she had warned someone on the campaign about him. (A Clinton aide, pressed by the New York Times, failed to track the person down.) “I don’t think people would rush forward to say ‘that was me!’” says Brown. “But listen, Obama had his daughter interning there, with Weinstein. The fact is if you send your daughter to intern with Harvey, it means that [the rumours] are not as widely spread as everybody thinks.”
It isn’t surprising Weinstein didn’t sexually harass Brown. He never pursued “boss class”, I suggest, and she agrees. “I was 25 when I became an editor-in-chief, so really I controlled my own world more than many women do. Sexual harassment is about somebody having power over you so that you think there’s a transaction that needs to happen for you to get ahead. I didn’t have that, because I defined my own working environment. Women, I think, feel other kinds of aggravation.”
One of these aggravations is money, and some of the most interesting parts of the Diaries relate to Brown’s reluctance to ask Si Newhouse for a pay rise. “I’ve always been very bad at it. It may be the British conditioning – I talk about the Brits being so hopeless when they come into town to try to raise money for Oxford. They’re so tentative and elliptical about it, they end up with nothing. But I think women feel much less confident, very often, when asking for more money and I can’t pretend I went barreling in and demanded a raise. I didn’t.”
Instead, she hired a lawyer and had him negotiate for her, something she admits “most women can’t afford. But to have an advocate felt, to me, very important. There was a lot of agonising about should I, shouldn’t I. My agent said why don’t you just go in and say, look, I’ve been delivering a big turnaround and I think I’ve been rather poorly compensated. And I couldn’t have that conversation.”
What did Harry say?
“He would say you’re underpaid, you need to go and ask for more. And I would say, but what if they say no?” In the end, she was galvanized by a discovery – “that the male editor of GQ was being paid more than me” – and still quaking at the temerity of it, had her lawyer negotiate a pay hike: $600,000 a year on a three-year contract, with a million-dollar bonus at the end.
Much of Brown’s basic confidence comes from her happy background. She grew up in Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire, with supportive parents who remained unfazed when in her teens she was expelled from school.
“They weren’t thrilled – they were cross with me – but they looked at the facts as they were. They thought the school was absurd. ‘Our daughter was expelled from this school because she rebelled against wearing two pairs of underwear.’ It’s like, you know what, I’m with her. I think if I’d been expelled for smoking dope and meeting boys over the wall, they might’ve taken a different attitude. But they supported the crimes of attitude. My mother was a very, very funny woman - she was a wildly funny, insubordinate kind of a woman. And my father was a movie producer so he just saw it as hilarious comedy.”
It was her parents’ willingness to move to New York to be with her two young children after school that enabled Brown to progress at Condé Nast; without their support, she says, her career would’ve stalled.
“That huge decision to leave Vanity Fair and go to the New Yorker – my biggest anxiety was not professional, it was personal. It was can I still be good mother to my two very young children, with a weekly [magazine], plus another huge turnaround? And it was only after my mother and father said they would come that I accepted the job.”
There were sections of the diaries Brown found stressful to revisit. Her son, George, was diagnosed with Asperger’s in his teens and his early years were fraught with anxiety. She wondered if she’d worked too hard and too close to her delivery date. One diary entry notes that when she took him to the park at the end of their street, the full time mums “with Waspy little purses and a lot of time on their hands … never invite me and G to join them.”
George is 31 now and works for a non-profit in Manhattan, “and he’s a fantastic and wonderful boy. I’m very proud of his accomplishments. But he’s still such a classic – he’s so funny. The thing about Asperger’s is that he just can’t help but tell the truth. He came to my book party and when Anna Wintour walked in he said, ‘Are you Camilla Parker Bowles’? And then when she said, ‘Well, no, I’m not’, he said, ‘Some other 80s person?’ And that’s what I love about having a boy who’s like that.”
The diaries reminded her of different time. “He wasn’t always easy to raise, and that comes over, I think. I’d forgotten my tremendous anxiety all the way through his babyhood: is he going to be damaged by being premature? Is he going to be different? Is it my fault? All of those questions.”
Evans supported her throughout, she says, which some husbands don’t. “A lot of men have difficulty with [a child with disabilities], particularly men who are older and think their kids are going to go racing off to Harvard. He was never like that. He loved Georgie, he loved both the kids, for what they were.” The night before the interview, I re-watched Attacking the Devil, the documentary of Evans’ campaign at the the Sunday Times in the 1970s to break the real story of the Thalidomide children. “He’s such a hero,” says Brown. “He’s my hero. He remains my hero. You very rarely end up still feeling that your husband’s a hero.”
Other heroes – or in Brown’s case, close friends, Charlie Rose among them – are falling like flies after being accused of sexual harassment. “I have held back a lot, recently. Because there are sometimes men that I love who are being accused, and I don’t really know the story. At the end of the day, friendship is important. And friends are for when it’s bad, right.”
What do you do?
“You reach out. And you also try to withhold judgment until you really know the facts. Sometimes you’re about to jump in and defend somebody and a whole bunch of facts emerges and you think, my god, I had no idea this was going on. So it’s a very tricky time for friendship. I want something positive to come out of this for women – and men. I mean you want men to feel they can champion this moment, rather than just being afraid of it.”
Other women of Brown’s generation have characterised aspects of the #metoo campaign as an over-reaction, but this is not her belief. “One of the interesting things is that the younger generation – my daughter is 27, and her generation has a zero-tolerance philosophy. Their attitude is: sod it, you’ve had your moment, guys, you’ve had it your own way, there may be some collateral damage, but that’s it. Obviously for those of us who’ve lived longer, we’ve seen the complexities and the nuances much more than younger people; I think there will be an over-correction and there will be collateral damage. And it’s painful, particularly for all their families. These people are married and have children. It’s deeply upsetting, and financially can be very punitive.”
On the other hand, she says, “I don’t think this explosion is about sexual harassment. I think it’s about women feeling stalled and furious. And I understand and totally validate that. I think women have played nice for a long time, and they keep on hearing about how things are going to change, and they don’t. It is kind of comic – and awful, and hilarious – that Harvey Weinstein of all people should be the man who elicits a referendum on masculinity. Talk about the extreme end. But sometimes that’s what it takes. Revolutions are always bloody.”
There have been suggestions that during her tenure at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Brown was harder on women writers than men, not least because men’s egos can require gentler handling when the boss is a woman. She says this is nonsense, as is the charge that she didn’t hire enough women: “the whole of top management that I put in at the New Yorker was women – Pamela McCarthy, Dorothy Wickenden, Susan Morrison, Lee Aitken. Everybody was a woman; I established almost a matriarchy. I had male writers, but I had a whole structure that was female dominated.”
Some of the accusations come from people Brown fired and as such are unreliable. Nevertheless, one does get the feeling Brown is more impatient with weakness in women than in men.
When I ask her about this, she replies, “at Vanity Fair the best of the writers were women, and they were tough. Marie Brenner, Gail Sheehy, Leslie Bennetts, Maureen Orth – I brought on these women and they did amazing work and they were not blushing violets; they pushed back. Writers can whine or be tough, depending on who they are. I love writers. I do. All of my most enduring relationships are with the writers I worked with because I think what I am able to do, as an editor, is know what I think and swiftly impart it with a suggestion of what is required. But that also means sometimes rejecting, and the slow “no” is the most agonising thing you can do for a writer, not saying what you think, dithering, torturing the writer, then rejecting it. That’s where you make the enemies.”
Enemies come via other routes, too, of course. “Did you see Garrison Keillor’s apology?” says Brown. “Oh my god, it was so … I felt rather gleeful.”
Oh, yes, he was shitty to you, right? “He was totally shitty to me. A raging misogynist who resigned on day one as I came into the New Yorker. He resigned [from Minnesota Public Radio last month] saying, oh, it’s true I put my hand on her backside and yes, it did drift upwards under her shirt. Can you imagine Joan Didion saying that? Margaret Atwood? Are we supposed to think it’s OK because it was only that?”
The habits of mind of an editor don’t change. Brown no longer has a publication, but she curates what she calls “live narrative” at her Women in the World events, a series of speaker conferences designed to provide a platform for women.
“I did a Woman in the World in Dallas two days ago and we had a woman on the panel who was kidnapped at the age of 17 and kept in captivity in a hotel room in Atlanta for four years, and when she was finally released, I discovered that she’d had a child in captivity and foster care will not let her have the child back.” Her eyes light up. “I immediately felt, oh my god: this is an incredible story.”