In the spring of 1977, a one-act play by a young English writer named Tina Brown debuted at a fringe theater in the Shepherd’s Bush neighborhood of London. Tina, a twenty-three-year-old Oxford graduate then sporting a mop of blond hair and oversized granny glasses, was a journalist with a growing reputation for coolly observed accounts of aristocrats behaving badly and humorous first-person pieces in which she, say, danced in a G-string at a strip club in Hackensack, New Jersey. (“The construction workers turned their backs and began to play pool,” she reported of the audience response.) Her theatrical endeavor, Happy Yellow, focused on a protagonist not unlike the playwright herself. Jackie Page is a “bright, sassy London career girl” trying to break into the glamorous world of Manhattan magazines. She boasts about A-list contacts and fantasizes about a high-powered editor who will splash her work on the cover of a glossy monthly, displacing an essay by Gore Vidal. As a wide-eyed Brit in Gotham, Jackie encounters a variety of American oddities—masturbation workshops, dog motels, death therapists—that would not be out of place in a future issue of Vanity Fair. Driven and a bit deluded, Jackie insists to her skeptical roommates that her journalistic talent will stand out. “Watch out New York,” she announces at one point. “Here I come!”
At the end of Happy Yellow, Jackie’s dreams fizzle out. Her real-life counterpart fared better. Tina came to New York in 1983, already a hot property in the magazine world. After stints as a feature writer at The Sunday Telegraph and The Times of London, Tina, at twenty-five, had been named the editor of Tatler, a moribund London social gazette, which she proceeded to revitalize with a string of impudent and deeply reported scoops. Tina penetrated Princess Margaret’s tropical citadel of Mustique (which she deemed a Club Med for royalty), persuaded the erotic film actress and Prince Andrew paramour Koo Stark to grant an interview, and penned an anonymous field guide to London’s eligible bachelors (sample entry: “a rising young barrister with a keen interest in ladies’ briefs but an even keener interest in the road to Number Ten”). Tatler’s investigations into Princess-to-be Diana earned Tina a guest anchor spot on NBC’s Today show.
The coverage electrified the British chattering classes and aroused the attention of Si Newhouse, who heard about the gleeful ruckus Tina was raising during his trips to check in on British Vogue. Si liked Tatler so much that he bought it; the magazine joined the Condé Nast stable in 1982, where it remains to this day. Tina quit the editorship the following year, but Si was reluctant to let her wander off—he sensed her skills might be useful in solving the ongoing catastrophe of his Vanity Fair. Tina had visited New York before, exploring the city on a three-month trip after Oxford during which she sublet a rundown apartment from a death therapist, later dramatized in Happy Yellow. In April 1983, she arrived in more upscale fashion, taxiing in from Kennedy Airport to a room at the Royalton Hotel, not far from Condé headquarters at 350 Madison. Alex Liberman had requested her presence and the two had plans to lunch at the Four Seasons. Jackie Page’s fantasy was on the verge of coming true.
“HOW DO I PIN YOU down? What do you want? We need you on Vanity Fair!”
So Alex began his efforts to persuade Tina Brown, over a lunch of crab cocktail and sparkling water, to help him fix one of the most dire threats he had faced in his long Condé Nast career. As he introduced his guest to the status markers of the Four Seasons Grill Room—which booth belonged to Philip Johnson and which to Si; why the upstairs section was Siberia, to be avoided at all costs—Alex affected the studied, urbane ease he had honed into an art form. “I’ve never taken my jacket off in 50 years of Condé Nast,” he once explained. “It signifies effort.” He refused to wear shirts with a patch pocket sewn onto the breast, believing it would lower his status in the eyes of others. For any junior editor with the temerity to challenge his directives, Alex’s flawless manners and immaculate dress sent the message that only one man fully understood the elusive mystique of Condé Nast, and it was best not to interfere.
But on this Tuesday, answers were eluding Alex. It had been only a few weeks since the disastrous debut of Richard Locke’s Vanity Fair, the magazine Alex had bet his reputation on, and for all his years of close collaboration with the Newhouses, he knew the family had little patience for a public humiliation. His own advancing age was also on his mind: at seventy, Alex, whose cultural radar was his currency, could not afford for Si to think he had lost his feel for the zeitgeist. The bright young woman before him presented an intriguing solution. Tina’s approach to covering English elites was irreverent and titillating; she had homed in on the humor and hypocrisy in Thatcher-era Britain, an apt antecedent to the Reaganism now sweeping America. Crucially, her magazine turned a profit, too: Tatler’s circulation grew ten times on her watch and began making money after years in the red.
Tina also offered some of the literary gravitas that Si wanted for Vanity Fair, which after all was supposed to compete with the vaunted New Yorker. At Oxford, Tina read English and dated Martin Amis; her circle included A-list scribes like Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) and Christopher Hitchens. Her affair with Harry Evans, the married Sunday Times of London editor who was twenty-five years her senior, had been a Fleet Street scandal. But by now the two had settled into a happy marriage, and Harry, among the most respected journalists of his generation, was looking for work after being ousted from his high-paying job at The Times by a brash new owner named Rupert Murdoch. Could there be a place at Condé for him, too? In a neat coincidence, Tina and Harry’s 1981 wedding had been held at Grey Gardens, the East Hampton estate of Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor whose great-uncle was Frank Crowninshield, of the original Vanity Fair. Alex may have wondered if this was fate.
Across the table, Tina’s heart sped up as she listened to Alex’s pitch. It had been a dream of hers to run a major American magazine, to break out from the parochialism of her native Britain, but she could not tell if Alex intended to simply hand her the reins or place her under Locke’s supervision. The sorry state of Vanity Fair required drastic change; without full creative control, she thought the assignment would be hopeless. Her mood darkened after Leo Lerman, under the guise of friendship, let drop that Si and Alex had suggested that he replace Locke as the editor in chief—a sotto voce confidence that doubled as a brushback pitch. Nonplussed, she told Alex she could do a two-month consultancy, and then let’s see where it goes. “It wasn’t so much the job itself that scared me, as New York,” Tina wrote in her diary. “I could be eaten alive in a place where I don’t know anybody or know where the alliances are.”
A wary courtship followed. Lerman had succeeded Locke by the time Tina’s stint began in May, and he quickly rejected most of her ideas out of hand. Feeling sidelined at the Vanity Fair offices, Tina instead focused on meeting New York’s movers and shakers while she was in town. At a Chelsea dinner party, she was seated beside Dominick Dunne, Joan Didion’s brother-in-law, a former film producer then trying to make it as a novelist. Dunne was a gossip and raconteur who had drifted in and out of American high society, with the kind of insider/outsider perspective that Tina often found made for the best journalists. He was from a well-off Irish Catholic family in WASP Connecticut—“minor-league Kennedys,” as he once put it—but his natty look of thick, round glasses and French-collared Turnbull & Asser shirts belied the rough edges of his life. Nick and his wife had once been celebrated for their lavish Los Angeles parties; Truman Capote, who attended a black-and-white ball thrown by the Dunnes for their tenth wedding anniversary, later stole the idea for his famous Plaza Hotel soiree, though he neglected to invite them. But Nick struggled when his marriage collapsed. He became addicted to alcohol and cocaine and fell into near-bankruptcy, reduced to selling his dog, a West Highland terrier, for $300. He was just piecing his life back together when his daughter, the twenty-two-year-old actress Dominique Dunne, was strangled by an ex-boyfriend. When Tina heard that Nick was planning to attend the murder trial, her editor’s brain stirred: the combination of a grisly crime, Dunne’s starry family, and his eye for society foibles felt potent. She urged him to keep a diary.
Back at 350 Madison, Tina’s frustrations were coming to a head. Infuriated by Lerman’s obstinance, she marched into Si’s fourteenth-floor office on June 25 and informed him that she would be departing Vanity Fair next week, when her consultancy ended. Si hated this sort of direct confrontation; such unpleasantness was why he surrounded himself with heavies like Roy Cohn who could handle conflict.
“But the timing…,” Si ventured. “Leo has just become editor. He needs time.”
“The magazine can no longer afford that time,” Tina retorted. “The only thing I can do for you when you are ready is be the editor.”
The meeting ended with no resolution. Si felt paralyzed. Lerman had been kind to him when he started at Vogue, one of the Condé potentates willing to mentor the callow heir in the customs of the elite. But he also desperately needed Vanity Fair to succeed, for Condé Nast’s reputation and his own. It was by far Si’s biggest gambit since Sam died, and the publishing world was wondering if the prodigal son could prove his skeptical father wrong. While Si hesitated, Tina flew back to Europe. She was about to turn thirty and figured she could easily find a job in England. But as she lay awake in her house in Pimlico, her thoughts kept wandering back to her glamorous sojourn in Manhattan, which she realized had surpassed London as the cultural and financial nucleus of the 1980s. She began taking sleeping pills for stress. When Women’s Wear Daily phoned her in London to ask about the state of Vanity Fair, Tina did not hold back. “If you have the wrong editor, then there is the wrong aura,” she told the paper, aware that Si and Alex would read her words. “The magazine was too dedicated to culture with a capital K, and art with a capital A. That just isn’t controversial enough. It makes people yawn.”
The call came in December, while Tina was lounging poolside in Barbados: her presence was requested at Si Newhouse’s Upper East Side town house. Once she made it past the security guard—Victoria had insisted on hiring one after a burglary attempt—she found Si and Alex huddled together in an upstairs library. Si broke the ice by ribbing her about the Women’s Wear comments, but after a few minutes of suspense, the offer was made: Tina Brown would become editor of Vanity Fair in the new year. The job had proved too taxing for Lerman, who weeks earlier had been hospitalized for a kidney stone; the public would be told he wished to return to editing and writing. Wary of gossip, the group arranged for Si and Tina to leave the house separately to avoid arousing suspicions among passersby.
Now the Cinderella routine began: Tina had to be given the trappings of a Condé Nast editor in chief. A corporate car, gym membership, and office designer were procured, along with an East Side apartment. In a sign of generosity, and perhaps desperation, Si acquiesced to a two-year contract, making Tina among the first Condé editors to secure such a lengthy commitment. Lerman was dismayed, although it was not the first or last time that Alex would ruthlessly cut loose a close friend. (A decade prior, Lerman had raged at Alex in his diary, calling him “evil—a dreadful being, a wretched murderous Russian of the blackest blood.”) But Alex rationalized it all to himself by focusing on his devotion to the institution, and what he deemed his own indispensable role. The posterity of Condé Nast, he had come to believe, rested on his shoulders.
Tina’s appointment was made public on January 4, 1984. The terse memo from Si described his new editor as “remarkably young.” Tina had no illusions that her arrival would be met with intense skepticism from the chattering classes, most of whom assumed Si’s exhumed version of Vanity Fair was headed back to the grave. Her editorship was the main topic of conversation at a chichi Manhattan party that week thrown by Arianna Stassinopoulos (soon-to-be Huffington), herself an Oxbridge near-contemporary of Tina’s, where the discussion focused on how long she could last in the job. It looked more and more like a delusional fantasy that Condé Nast, province of women’s magazines, had ever hoped to play in the first-tier literary sandbox. All Tina could do was plead her case. “I want to share my perception of what is funny, fascinating, true and beautiful,” she told Newsweek. “And I don’t want to be an editor in brief.”
IT TOOK ABOUT EIGHTEEN MONTHS for Tina to fully find her footing at Vanity Fair, but when she was done remaking the magazine, it had ascended from an industry embarrassment to a must-read in Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and Washington, DC. Tina turned the magazine into an emblem of 1980s America, its cheerful excess and unapologetic worship of celebrity and wealth. Along the way, she innovated practices that are now so ubiquitous in the world of upscale journalism that it can be hard to imagine they hadn’t always existed.
Her first issue, April 1984, opened with a Helmut Newton cover portrait of Daryl Hannah, the actress who, weeks earlier, had been launched to stardom playing a mermaid in Splash. Hannah posed blindfolded with an Oscar in each hand, beside the headline “Blonde Ambition.” The image evoked Hollywood glamour, the scales of justice, and a frisson of kink—not an unrepresentative blend of the new Vanity Fair’s preoccupations. Dominick Dunne’s murder trial diary, commissioned by Tina, had been a big hit in the March issue; for April, Tina asked Dunne to write on the enduring appeal of movie-star blondes, illustrated with sexy photographs of Hannah, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kim Basinger. If the blondes titillated readers, the next page flattered their intellect: a new short story by E. L. Doctorow, followed by an excerpt from David Mamet’s upcoming Broadway play Glengarry Glen Ross. A pair of nostalgic features about the heydays of Keith Richards and Diana Vreeland rounded out the issue, advertised on the cover with a puckish, Tatler-style tease: “Vreeland Remembers—Keith Richards Doesn’t.” All this, plus a feature on literary sex scenes, and cameos by Sting, Malcolm Forbes, Barbara Walters, and Prince Michael of Greece.
These days, TikTok and Instagram serve up a similar cultural stew: a model in a bikini, followed by an exegesis on the Israel–Palestine conflict, followed by Kim Kardashian promoting a Skims collection. In 1984, this blend was virtually unheard of. Magazines, the prevailing pulp-and-ink vessels of culture, were highly regimented: The New Republic for politics, People for gossip, Playboy for breasts. That a single publication might contain this mix of high and low, crude and refined, was a novelty. “No one, the makers of the magazines or the people who read them, really understood this concept of high/low,” recalls Stephen Schiff, one of Tina’s core team of writers. “You bought a magazine because everything in it had the same sensibility. If it was Seventeen, it was about women and clothes. If it was The Atlantic, it was about head-scratching issues. Vanity Fair was a magazine about both at the same time, and everything in between. And that became, very quickly, an exciting way to go.”
Tina did land on one consistent theme for her magazine: money. In her short time in America, she had discovered a Manhattan awash in wealth, its upper class transfixed by the opulent lifestyles of corporate raiders like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, who made the delinquent toffs of Tatler seem quaint. The sheer fact of wealth, or becoming wealthy, was now synonymous with social status. Gone were the Mrs. Astor-esque aspersions that had previously been cast upon the nouveau: witness the social success of Saul Steinberg, the outer-borough billionaire who scandalized the Wall Street old guard before moving into John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s former apartment on Park Avenue and becoming a coveted 1980s party host. When Tina went to lunch at Le Cirque for the first time, she sized up the crowd like an anthropologist: “all the ladies who lunch in red capes and big, gleaming earrings eating pink fish.” Back at the office, she ordered up a portrait of its dining room for the next issue, a field guide to the new American rich. Her social circle soon included moguls like Barry Diller, Ahmet Ertegun, and Mort Zuckerman.
For all her precocity, this was fresh territory for Tina. She was born on November 21, 1953, into an upper-middle-class family, comfortable but not posh. Her father, George Brown, was a producer of British B-movies, including early adaptations of Agatha Christie, whose career fell on hard times. Her mother, Bettina, had worked as an assistant to Laurence Olivier. Tina grew up in Little Marlow, a village northwest of London, and while she was sent to fancy boarding schools, she had a tendency to get kicked out of them. Her outsider status came in handy when she found herself inside the citadels of the ruling class: her first scoop came after she attended an off-the-record lunch at London’s satirical magazine Private Eye and then wrote it all up in an Oxford student magazine. One friend described her, fondly, as “a police reporter for the media and political upper class.”
Wealth, in one sense, had always been the underlying focus of Condé Nast, whose publications, since the Gilded Age, had offered a glimpse into the lives and habits of the well-born. What Tina recognized—ahead of Si and Alex, and certainly her predecessors Locke and Lerman—was that in the 1980s, the market for the Condé approach had vastly expanded. Just days after Si announced her appointment as editor, Time ran an article called “Here Come the Yuppies!” “Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors and $450,000 condos in semi-slum buildings?” the magazine asked. The answer might as well have been the prospective readership of Vanity Fair. In the first three years of Tina’s editorship, the number of American households that earned $50,000 or more (roughly $145,000 in today’s dollars) nearly doubled in size. Popular resentment toward the rich, too, had begun to fade. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous started airing the same week that Tina’s first issue of Vanity Fair hit newsstands, tantalizing viewers with yachts, mansions, and tanned men in ascots. “It’s almost as though they were tuning in to take notes on how they would take their money and spend it,” observed the host, Robin Leach.
The naked aspiration of the yuppies was echoed by changes in the establishment upper crust. Whereas the old-line wealthy had once adhered to a kind of WASP omertà, in which the topic of money was considered, along with politics and religion, unfit for polite conversation, the rich of the 1980s felt liberated to flaunt it. “It was the first time in my life,” recalled the writer Fran Lebowitz, “that people who had money talked about money all the time.”
All of which boded very well for the financial future of Condé Nast. Si had bet big on magazines aimed at an upscale readership. The luxury advertisers hawking BMWs, Dubonnet, and Perrier water needed a place to reach their yuppie quarry. By amping up the eighties excess—Imelda Marcos! Scandals in the Hamptons!—Tina had delivered it: by spring 1986, she claimed that half of Vanity Fair readers had a net worth of $1 million or more. A singularity of sorts occurred when, shortly into her tenure, Tina assigned a cover story on Dynasty, the prime-time soap about a plutocratic oil clan that debuted eight days before Reagan’s inauguration and became a massive hit. Tina was desperate for its star, Joan Collins, to pose for the magazine. She made a pleading phone call—“Please, please, please do the cover!”—and invoked Joan’s long-ago collaboration with her father in England. “You were my father’s friend,” Joan recalled Tina saying. “Please do it as a favor to me.” There was a last-minute crisis when a former costar of Joan’s accidentally shot himself on a soap opera set; the original headline, “But Darling, You Know I Am Bulletproof,” had to be scrapped. Instead, the Herb Ritts portrait of Joan ran with an instant-classic headline: “She Rhymes with Rich.”
IN 1985, TINA FLEW TO london to report an exposé on the troubled marriage of Diana and Charles. Tossing aside the propriety usually afforded to British royals by the American press, Tina gathered all the vicious rumors about the Waleses that had been floated in the Fleet Street tabloids and repackaged them into a glossy feature for American readers, headlined “The Mouse That Roared.” The story caused a scandal on both sides of the Atlantic, in no small part for Tina’s conclusion that Charles was “pussy-whipped from here to eternity.” In a television interview broadcast in Britain, Diana and Charles were confronted with the reporting of this upstart American magazine; the prince went out of his way to dismiss Tina’s assertion that he had relied on the assistance of a Ouija board to contact his beloved late great-uncle Lord Mountbatten. “I don’t even know what they are,” Charles complained. Tina’s gossipy, intrusive report was a far cry from the decorous manner in which Condé Nast publications like Vogue and House & Garden wrote about European royalty. The issue also sold extremely well, catching the attention of Tina’s rival editors in the United States. The story was a starting gun of sorts for the genre of leering coverage of royal sex lives that would become ubiquitous in the international press.
About a year prior, Tina had taken a similarly brash approach to another subject that was usually handled ever-so-gently at Condé Nast: national politics. Vogue featured First Ladies, and Frank Crowninshield had once included Adolf Hitler on his raffish “We Nominate for Oblivion” list, but the company was reluctant to repel readers seeking an escape to the softer side of life. In 1984, Tina jettisoned this tradition and asked Gail Sheehy to cover the presidential campaign for Vanity Fair. Sheehy was a veteran journalist known for her immersive reporting on sex workers, drug abuse, and other gritty topics for New York magazine; she had also written the bestseller Passages, an ur-seventies examination of Americans’ emotional lives. At the time, campaign journalism was dominated by the “Boys on the Bus,” reporters for newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post who wrote up the day’s proceedings and shied away from candidates’ personal lives. Tina wanted a more psychological approach that considered politicians as warts-and-all human beings, something closer in timbre to the rollicking London tabloids she grew up on.
Sheehy’s first subject was Gary Hart, the movie-star-handsome senator from Colorado. A rising star in the Democratic Party, Hart had unexpectedly surged in the early primaries against Walter Mondale. Sheehy discovered that Hart had maintained a years-long friendship with Marilyn Youngbird, an Indigenous woman who Hart referred to as “my spiritual adviser.” Youngbird had arranged for Native American medicine people to pray for Hart’s political success, including a ceremony devoted to his electoral efforts in Iowa and New Hampshire. When Sheehy asked Hart about Youngbird, the candidate promptly produced a note from Marilyn that he kept in his jacket pocket. “Go to nature,” she had written. “Hug a tree. Come and say prayers with me. Nobody needs to know. It’s between you and the Great Spirit.”
Hart had a bit of a hippy-dippy reputation, but this was one woo-woo too many. Sheehy’s article caused a sensation. When it appeared, Hart had narrowly lost the nomination, but he was jockeying for the vice-presidential slot on Mondale’s ticket. The Marilyn Youngbird details deeply troubled Mondale’s aides. A furious Hart had disputed Sheehy’s reporting, calling it “terribly inaccurate,” but the damage was done; Geraldine Ferraro was picked instead. Decades later, the episode still stings. “The story you mention was wrong then and it is still wrong,” Hart wrote to me in 2023 when I inquired about his perspective on the piece. “I see no important purpose being served by responding yet again to a 30- or more-year-old inaccurate and harmful story.”
The unmasking, in 1987, of Hart’s relationship with an actress and former beauty contestant named Donna Rice is now viewed as a turning point in political journalism, supposedly the moment when reporters cast aside old protocols and began disclosing the more hidden aspects of a politician’s personal life. (The alleged affair forced the married Hart to drop out of the 1988 presidential race, though he and Rice denied that their friendship was sexual in nature.) Sheehy’s Vanity Fair story presaged that moment by several years. It was a portent of where American politics was headed: toward the feeding frenzy of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the emphasis on gossip, vice, and personal foibles. Sheehy’s approach was intrusive and a bit vulgar, but it not only broke news—it was news. Tina had taken the first step toward a glossy celebrity magazine becoming a required read (if a furtive one) in the halls of Congress and a bestseller on Washington newsstands.
But it was a very different political feature that would prove to the world—and, perhaps more importantly, to Si—that Vanity Fair had arrived.
ONE LATE-WINTER DAY IN 1985, Tina Brown walked into the Map Room of the White House accompanied by the Scottish photographer Harry Benson, whose visual legacy already included the Beatles’ pillow fight at the Hotel George V in Paris and the first horrifying images of Senator Robert F. Kennedy on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, bleeding to death after being shot by an assassin. Vanity Fair had negotiated a few minutes’ access to Ronald and Nancy Reagan for a formal First Couple portrait.
Despite establishing herself on the Park Avenue and Beverly Hills circuit—collecting fancy friends like the Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar and the Republican socialite Pat Buckley—Tina had not yet secured her future at Condé Nast. Her punchy stories and lively covers (a nude, come-hither Jerry Hall greeted readers in March 1985) had people talking, but advertisers were wary, still feeling burned from the dismal failure of the overhyped Richard Locke era. Vanity Fair’s ad revenue fell to $4 million in 1984, down from $6.3 million a year before. Si had also just bought The New Yorker, his holy grail; Tina wondered if that meant he no longer needed Vanity Fair for intellectual bona fides. Would Si combine the magazines and exile Tina back to England?
Tina shoved those thoughts aside as the Reagans swept into the room, Ronnie in a tuxedo and his wife in a sequined gown. The shoot had been shoehorned in before a state dinner for the president of Argentina, and Tina worried there wouldn’t be enough time to make the pictures pop. But Benson had planned ahead. In those pre-9/11 days, before the White House became a fortress, the photographer had managed to smuggle in a boom box, which at that moment began emitting the opening notes of Frank Sinatra’s “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).”
The First Lady was charmed. “I love this song, honey,” she told the president. “Let’s dance.”
According to Tina and Benson’s accounts, Reagan briefly resisted—“We can’t keep the president of Argentina waiting, Nancy”—before his wife exclaimed, “Let him wait!” and fell into her husband’s arms. If it sounded like dialogue from a Fred Astaire film, the tableau of the foxtrotting black-tie couple was straight out of Old Hollywood. Tina did not dare exhale lest she break the spell. Finally, Benson urged the president to “give your wife a kiss!” Ronnie complied. The resulting photograph—the Reagans’ eyes squeezed shut, their lips abutting—was unlike any previous White House portrait. Americans had seen their presidents and First Ladies in fusty wedding photos, and the Kennedys had been particularly adept at the illusion of inviting the public into their (carefully edited) family life. But here was a live glimpse of real romance, the movie-star president and his starlet bride: an instant icon of the 1980s entwinement of celebrity, glamour, and power.
Tina knew she was sitting on dynamite. To her chagrin, she discovered that while getting the pictures was one thing, getting them published was another. Her hurdle was the squeamishness of Si. For all its eagerness to play in the journalism big leagues, Condé Nast was still an institution in thrall to social protocol. Si had heard through his circle that Nancy Reagan was worried about the photos and insisted that Tina overnight copies to the White House press office—a mortifying concession for an editor accustomed to the pirate-ship independence of Fleet Street. Tina hopped the shuttle to Washington and delivered the dummy layouts herself, sweet-talking Nancy’s press secretary and offering to run the “kiss” picture inside, with heels-up Nancy on the cover.
The images appeared in late May, alongside the headline “The Reagan Stomp: They Could Have Danced All Night.” Si need not have worried: the accompanying article, by the Reagan sycophant William F. Buckley Jr., was a gushing tribute about how the couple had “Fred-and-Gingered-up the social life of America.” Rather than let the issue passively seep into the zeitgeist, Tina booked herself onto the network morning shows to ensure that all of Middle America knew about her coup. This was the sort of thing that editors simply did not do—and while it was in the service of selling magazines, popping up on the Today show conveniently raised Tina’s profile, too.
As Tina predicted, the Reagan issue was a sellout—and just in the nick of time. Privately, Si had decided that he had spent enough of his family’s money trying to keep Vanity Fair afloat. He had splashed out $168 million on The New Yorker; maybe the tens of millions of dollars in losses on his other literary title weren’t worth it. Tina was flying to San Francisco for a book fair when the early rumors emerged. Desperate, she called a colleague in New York and prevailed on him to intercept Si the next day at 6 a.m., his customary arrival time at the Condé offices. Tell Si that Vanity Fair had found its footing, she instructed—the buzz around the Reagan photos was immense—and he’d be a fool to pull the plug. The pitch worked: Si agreed to give Tina two more years, which she interpreted as Condé-speak for six months.
TOPPING THE STOMP WAS NO small task, but Tina had already set another major feature in motion. A few months before Si’s wobble on Vanity Fair, she had assigned Dominick Dunne a story in his sweet spot of sex, violence, and society: a profile of Claus von Bülow, the infamous man-about-town who had been convicted of trying to murder his wife, Sunny, with injections of insulin. That verdict had been overturned, and von Bülow was now awaiting a new trial while living with a girlfriend in Sunny’s gilded Fifth Avenue apartment, while his wife lay comatose in a hospital. Tina asked Helmut Newton to fly in from Monte Carlo and accompany Dunne on the assignment. After a warm welcome, Newton, in a naughty mood, encouraged von Bülow to try on a different outfit, cooing, “Oh Claus, you would look so good in leather…” To Dunne and Newton’s shock, von Bülow emerged in a kinky black leather jacket and gamely posed for the camera. (Von Bülow would later be acquitted.) Stephen Schiff remembered Newton’s reaction when he brought the contact sheet back to 350 Madison: “Can you believe this?!”
Here in one story was the Tina formula: celebrity, titillation, money, and, like bitters added to a cocktail, an invigorating dash of bad taste. “You have to occasionally do things that other people say, ‘My God, you know, why did they do that?’ ” she told 60 Minutes when the CBS show profiled Vanity Fair, itself an indication of just how big her magazine had become. “If you don’t, you’re not alive. You’re boring.” Once again, Tina took an unusually active role in ensuring von Bülow would make a splash, leaking word of the leather pictures to gossip queen Liz Smith. The ensuing shock—that the aspirational VF was choosing to glamorize a man accused of attempted murder—convinced her to knock Matt Dillon off the cover and run von Bülow in a tuxedo instead.
It may not have been obvious at the time, but Tina’s sensibility was now permanently reshaping what was deemed acceptable cultural fare for the intellectual class. The von Bülow feature was basically an upscale gossip column, dressed up in Dunne’s patrician prose and Newton’s arch, high-gloss aesthetic. Tina was offering elites the leeway to embrace vulgarity. “With Vanity Fair, you don’t have to pretend that intellectual pursuits are incompatible with interest in fashion, taste, and, yes, even scandal,” she wrote in a note to readers.
Tina recognized that America’s Reaganite turn was fueling a new kind of cultural collapse. Status in England was conferred at birth, so posh Brits had no qualms about enjoying Monty Python alongside Shakespeare. But in America, which had no hereditary aristocracy, distinctions of taste were distinctions of class. The explosion in wealth in the 1980s destroyed those old rules. Status in America had gone postmodern. It was now less about rigid hierarchies than indulging in a cultural potpourri, whatever was trendy, popular, and new: a “hierarchy of hotness,” to borrow a phrase from the writer John Seabrook, himself a Tina recruit. “I remember going to lunch with Tina one day and she said, ‘Michael, you know the articles just have to be hot, hot, hot,’ ” recalled Michael Shnayerson, another Vanity Fair writer. “I remember her standing in a corner saying, ‘Hot hot hot.’ ” Thanks to Tina, Condé Nast was now reflecting, and advancing, this cultural shift. “Image replaced reality,” VF later declared in an assessment of the 1980s. “Life-style replaced life. Hype hijacked art.” Even Tina was taken aback at the squares who were enchanted by her high/low mix. When Robert MacNeil, the straitlaced coanchor of The MacNeil-Lehrer Report on PBS, told her he had enjoyed a recent Vanity Fair piece on Madonna, Tina was shocked.
“Why are you reading this?” she asked.
Because, MacNeil replied, “It was right next to the Arafat story. I read that and then my eye wandered to Madonna.”
Rival editors grumbled that Tina was playing to the lowest common denominator, indulging the public’s baser instincts. Sometimes, the complaint came from inside the house. Si’s daughter, Pamela Mensch, once lamented to her father about the changes at Condé. “For me, Vanity Fair was like a soft-porn magazine,” she told me. “It became pretty sleazy. There was a deterioration in the values somewhere there.” Si heard her out, but took no action; he was pleased with the fat advertising pages, which tripled between 1985 and 1988. “If it was making a profit,” Mensch observed, “that elicited his admiration.”
It was also deeply satisfying to Si that his competitors—once so dismissive of the Newhouse name—were now scrambling to keep up. Tina was poaching star writers from places like The New York Times Magazine and mocking her rivals in the press. “There are good things in it,” she told a reporter about the Times Magazine. “Every fourth issue or so there’s something I want to read.” It wasn’t just the buzz luring writers into Tina’s orbit. Thanks to Si’s largesse, she paid extremely well. By 1989, Vanity Fair writers were earning two dollars a word, double the going rate; annual contracts for some contributors topped $100,000, or $250,000 in today’s dollars. Esquire and New York had to raise their rates to compete. The result was another of Tina’s legacies to the culture: bringing magazine journalists, for decades an underpaid species, into the financial security of the upper-middle class. “I could send a daughter to private school and college,” Shnayerson recalled. Vanity Fair contributors lunched at Michael’s and Mortimer’s, with Condé footing the bill. Tina sent flower arrangements to their homes and handed out Broadway tickets; her holiday gifts included cashmere shawls and Sony Discmans. Tina firmly believed that if writers inhabited the shimmering world they covered, access and authenticity would follow.
THE MATTER OF CELEBRITY—cultivating it, championing it, fawning over it—was the other key ingredient of Tina’s Vanity Fair. She doused her issues in eye-popping Annie Leibovitz portraits of a sunglassed, bathrobed Jack Nicholson, flicking golf balls off the bluff of his Mulholland Drive manse; Diane Sawyer in a shoulder-baring Calvin Klein dress (“Sawyer as You Never Saw Her”); Michael Jackson mid-moonwalk; an ecstatic Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a Cleopatra-like bath of milk. On its covers, Vanity Fair showcased the ample décolletage of Annette Bening, Madonna, Ivana Trump, Jessica Lange, Madonna (again), Kathleen Turner, Sigourney Weaver, Cybill Shepherd, Madonna (one more time), Elizabeth Taylor, and, finally, Roseanne Barr, pictured in a fox stole and blond wig and pinning her then husband, Tom Arnold, to the floor. (Headline: “Roseanne on Top—But Who’s the Boss?”)
This was hardly the confrontational, bite-the-hand journalism that Tina had practiced in her salad days at Tatler. Month after month, Vanity Fair elevated its subjects to the level of secular deities. The profiles that ran alongside Leibovitz’s glamour shots inevitably served as tributes to the celebrity’s grace under the pressures of fame, with much made about box office grosses and luminous skin. Madonna, as described in the December 1986 issue, was “a startling beauty of almost eighteenth-century purity.” Nicholson, in April 1992, was “at fifty-four, the hippest guy in Hollywood… still ready to tear it up.”
The hagiography extended to corporate executives, those pink-faced suits who had once shied away from the glitz that Tina, and the new eighties cult of capitalism, now afforded them. Steve Ross, co-chairman of the conglomerate Time Warner, posed for Annie Leibovitz in a Lethal Weapon 2 windbreaker next to a blurb admiring his stratospheric salary; a few pages later, David Geffen lounged tanned and topless, like a Greek god, in the aqua-blue paradise of his Malibu mansion. Michael Ovitz, the CAA honcho, turned up in the same issue as Ross and Geffen, looking very master-of-the-universe for Leibovitz’s camera while standing on the roof of his company’s I. M. Pei building in Beverly Hills. “In Hollywood he’s the dealer—the others are players,” read the caption.
Ovitz happened to be one of Tina’s key facilitators for gaining access to stars—seven CAA clients graced Vanity Fair covers in 1989—but their coziness also led to one of the more embarrassing episodes of Tina’s tenure. Spy, the magazine started by Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter to acidly satirize the media world, obtained a letter that Tina sent to Ovitz in 1988 asking that he participate in a Vanity Fair profile. It was a symphony of sycophancy.
“As I see it, the world has a very limited and unsophisticated grasp of what an ‘agent’ does, particularly when that agent is you,” Tina cooed. “It seems to me that a better term for your role in the life of Hollywood would be a catalyst: activating creativity by a gifted sense of talent, material, timing and taste, plus, of course, extraordinary business acumen in putting it all together.” She praised CAA’s “efficiency and esprit de corps,” Ovitz’s “aura of leadership,” and compared him to Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder of Hollywood’s golden era. And while Tina apologetically explained that she could not write the profile herself, citing parenting duties for her three-year-old son, she promised that “I would be watching over it and shaping it every step of the way.” (Ovitz declined the request.)
The letter’s exposure only intensified the blowback from media critics who impugned Tina for what they deemed an insufficiently critical posture toward the powerful. Examples were legion: a 1988 panegyric on Ralph Lauren, “the archetypal American outdoorsman” (and a major advertiser); an unctuous 1987 cover story on Calvin Klein (ditto). Among the other advertisers enjoying kid-gloves treatment were Ronald Lauder (heir to Estée Lauder), Donna Karan, Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino, and Gianni Versace. Inside 350 Madison, Vanity Fair staffers sometimes glimpsed Tina’s more transactional side. Stephen Schiff, a tweedy cinephile and Pulitzer finalist, was initially hired as a film critic. One day, Tina called him into her office.
“Eddie Murphy just refused to be on our cover,” she said. “It seems to be about something you said.” (Schiff had recently published a tough review of a Murphy flick.)
“I don’t actually need film criticism,” Tina continued. “I need Eddie Murphy on the cover. I love what you do—would you please do something else?” Schiff wrote features from then on.
In public, Tina shrugged off the complaints. “Actors shouldn’t be subjected to the same scrutiny as a politician or a crime boss or somebody who is impacting public life,” she said in 1992. Plus, she reasoned, Vanity Fair used the frothy lure of cleavage and gossip to entice readers for more nourishing fare, like Gail Sheehy’s profile of Mikhail Gorbachev and Marie Brenner’s investigation into Donald Trump’s past. (Trump was so angry about that one that he poured a glass of wine down the back of Brenner’s gown at a black-tie event at Tavern on the Green.) The formula was also a success: Vanity Fair’s ad revenue increased 60 percent each year between 1984 and 1988. Meanwhile, the entire glossy magazine industry was bending Tina-ward. In 1981, Esquire did not feature a single movie star on its covers; a decade later, the celebrity count had gone up to nine out of twelve issues.
TINA HAD ALWAYS BEEN a world-class self-promoter, honing her skills as a girl when she stayed up late at her film producer father’s cocktail parties, where she’d be seen chatting away on the knee of the most prominent actor in attendance. As Vanity Fair grew, Tina was featured in Page Six and other big gossip columns as reliably as the celebrities she chronicled. “Tina almost created the whole idea of being hot at the same time she created the idea that Tina is hot,” one Vanity Fair editor remarked.
In the eighty-odd years that the Condé Nast Publications had existed, an editor in chief had never achieved this level of infamy. Diana Vreeland may have come closest, given her outlandish declarations and frequent mixing with Andy Warhol and the Studio 54 set. But Grace Mirabella? Edna Woolman Chase? These names meant everything to fashion insiders and society mavens, but they were hardly the stuff of American dinner table discussion or prime-time news specials. Tina’s notoriety, and the obvious influence she now wielded over the Manhattan and Hollywood publicity-industrial complex, meant that what went on inside 350 Madison was increasingly the subject of outside scrutiny and fascination. Tina had fulfilled the prophecy of Jackie Page, her Happy Yellow alter ego from 1977, who observed, “One’s job isn’t just a meal ticket. It’s an extension of one’s whole personality.”
The editor-as-celebrity model had attracted a flood of advertising money and the kind of cultural cachet that Si loved. After years in the doldrums, Condé Nast was at the peak of the magazine industry. Si was besotted by his brilliant British hire; when archrival Hearst tried to poach her to run Harper’s Bazaar, he raised her salary to $600,000 a year (plus a $1 million bonus) and forgave the $300,000 loan he had extended so she and Harry could move into a sumptuous apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. But now the search was on for the next Tina. Si wanted to replicate her editorial magic at his other publications, to bring the Vanity Fair zhuzh to the rest of his empire. And Alex Liberman had introduced him to another ambitious and preternaturally talented editor who shared Tina’s Fleet Street instincts, British taste, and penchant for getting into trouble in school.
Anna Wintour had arrived.