I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. Crime and unemployment were still high, but it was mourning in corporate America. The Dow was up by a third and six months, and the go go eighties had begun. Among the many who landed in New York to make their fortune that year was a hot shot magazine editor from London who would chronicle and then shape that decade like no other. Tina Brown was twenty nine years old.
Her story became inseparable from that of her creation, a relaunched nineteen twenties glossy that came to define the Reagan era. Vanity Fair. Brown was a decisive boss, an instinctive editor, and a pioneer of layout. But that's only a part of what secured her place on top of New York society. She brought to her dinner parties and outsider's power of social observation and a wit so sharp you didn't know you were bleeding until you were halfway home. But Tina
Brown can tell her own story. She did, in fact, in real time. Her new book, Vanity Fair Diaries, as a series of diary entries, starting the day she first landed in New York for Vanity Fair Wednesday made the first Thursday January Monday Wednesday of Sunday, April tenth three, I am here in NYC at last, brimming with fear and insecurity, getting in late last night on British airways.
I suddenly felt the enormousness of New York City. And she made it to the big leagues because four years earlier, barely out of Oxford, Tina Brown landed the editorship of a languishing old magazine called Tatler after everyone else turned down the job, and I turned it into this very buzzy little glossy and signed new House, who was then the chairman of Conninnass. Then after two years and me editing it three years, he came in and he bore
it for Connas. So that's how I joined conn asked, was that I was really brought into the family of Connynas with Tatler and you over there when I was in London, And how long did you do that under his ownership? Well? I left actually after about a year because the Tatler had been this kind of scrappy little startup, and when Connynas bought it, I missed the insurgent nature of the public. You know. I I loved having my little team of insurgents, these young turks that I had
out of college. And then when Conny Nass brought it, I felt it had become a sort of stately thing, and I just, you know, I love being in the kind of the rebel band, you know, so I left. Actually, people don't normally put you in the rebel band. Well, I know, some pretty ivory towers, right, but rebel band is where I began, and I love that. And I had a very brilliant young group who all went on
to do great things at Connas. So I left. And then as I left, I kept hearing that Connyn Asked had launched this new magazine in America, Vanity Fair, that this was they were bringing back this icon, this old magazine of the twenties and thirties that had had all these amazing you know, people like Claire Booth Loosen and
Dorothy Parker and so on writing for it. And I was very attracted to that because I'm a sort of magazine romantic, so I never thought I would get to edit it, but I you know, we heard it, like the music in the other room. Then Conan Has launched Vanity Fair in eighty three, and it was a complete debarkle, you know, the first two arts. But it was one of those things where the sort of the pre hype
sort of almost killed the magazine. It was a complete dissonance between the magazine they were advertising and hyping and the magazine they put out. They what was the chasm between the two. The chasm between the two was that they said, great magazine comes back from the dead, legendary magazine. You'll never see anything more exciting, more glamorous, more important than this magazine. And then they had a very bookish, very you know, a nerdy, smart guy from the New
York Times who've never been a magazine editor. His name was Richard Lock, okay, and you know, on paper he was a good hire. He was a brainy guy, but he never done a magazine. And magazines it's it's all about the chemistry of the words and the pictures and the headlines and the you know, and the captions and all the things that make a magazine dance. He didn't know how to do that. So it was a very
boring magazine who was after him. And then they had they fired him and brought on Leo Lehman, who was the former editor of features editor Vogue. He was a kind of seventy five year old, you know, culture maven, old kind of gossipy old guy who know who was the sort of the darling of the ladies who lunch completely antique, had absolutely no concept of how to do
this thing at all. He then flamed out, and when he was there, I was asked by by Connyan asked to come in and sort of consult because I then left out or and they thought, all of this young turk who you know who then split, let's bring her into American contynent asked to see whether she can help old Leo kind of get the thing right, and the consult the payment to consult. And I spent three months there and I realized that Leah was never going to
get this right, that he was a complete fiasco. Um. He was fiercely jealous of me anyway and didn't want me anywhere near it. And I realized, Hey, I could do this thing. Why am I being so timid? You wanted to? I then really wanted to. Yes, I decided I'd made a mistake not sort of pitching myself to do it, that I should have pitched myself to do it.
I kind of felt that I had whipped out by not saying to them at the beginning, I'd love to do this from the time you finished a tattlet and then your consultancy less, how long before you take over Vanity Fair? Um, it was about nine months, not even a year, and yeah, yeah, and I came back. So my Vanity Fair diaries really sort of begin at that time because I came in as a consultant in in the summer of eighty three with Leo, and the diaries sort of showed the rising realization that I should be
the editor of this magazine. This magazine and I were made to make music together. I left New York, went back to London, and they finally and brought me back as editor. In so to the extent that you can say, I mean, all people really have in the popular culture is um Devil Wears Prada and all these very very
kind of theatrical representations of the world of publishing. Is it really that one person has to dominate and their will has to call the day you had to sit there with a group of people say it's got to be this and this that you took their advice. What did you do? I mean, a great editor isn't an autocrat. I mean you have to have a vision, in the same way the director has to have a vision of a movie, and you have us to have a world view. Two. I mean, my my feeling was that Vanity Fair. I
knew what I wanted to do with Vanity Fair. I wanted to combine the elegance and glamor of the magazine, of the famous magazine of the twenties and thirties, with some of that narrative gristle of journalism that had then become the sort of defining feature of the great magazines of them the seventies and eighties, like Rolling Stone, like New York Magazine. So I wanted to modernize that formula, if you like, and then bring a kind of real
modern spin. And the modern spin I brought because this was we were in the Reagan era, right we just roll Reagan was on a glide path to re election. I came in as a London outsider who didn't know really much about America, and I was just plunged into this world of Reagan's America, which was this kind of black tie wildly consumers, you know, Bob, he was on
the magazine. It was just, I mean, it boggles my mind when I when I read the diaries now and when I started to compile them, how much we went out. I mean every night. It was like I had red nails and the long dress, and it was like the black tie dinners and the higher New York, New York and Higher New York. You know, Nancy Reagan and her Walkers, and Jerry Zipkin was this socialite with a face like a b Day That's exactly. You got those names and they were out there, you know, and it was enormous
fund to cover it. And then in the meantime in then in l A there was all this kind of the rise of the Spellings, you know, and Andy Spelling and the big houses and the monster mansions and the whole of this thing. So it was a wonderful world to cover. And I sort of felt that our mission was to dramatize it, make it saying in our pages. And I had my very first hire as a writer
actually was Dominic Dunne. And Dominic Dunne I first met when I came as a consultant in the summer at the dinner party of Marie Brenner, who was a vanity affair, and he was this out of work film producer, and he was next to me, and he was so great, and he was so entertaining and dinner and then he told me this horrendous story that his daughter had been murdered and he was on his way out to l A to the trial of his daughter's murderer. And I said,
why don't you keep a diary? Being a great darist myself, I said, you know, keep a diary. Maybe you would make it into something to read, and I'd love to publish it. So he his eyes lit up, and off he went. And the piece that he brought back, which was published in the magazine, was an absolutely epic piece of sort of narrative personal journalism. So my very first high when I came back and as editor in eighty four, I said to Nick, you know, I want you to be my first hire. I want to get a chowd
of writers who can define the magazine. And that's, of course what he helped to do. Now, for those who don't know this, you kept copious diary entries. What is it about you that you're such a dedicated diarist. I've tried that myself. I've got boxes when have books in them and notebooks, and some of them have those little diary like looks them and you open and doesn't mean maybe like a week's worth of entries and then's gone. Well, I think I'm a compulsive reporter. Actually, I mean, I
have what I think of as observation greed. Right, most of the time, I'm propelled to go out, not because I actually want to go out, but I think I got to see that, you know, I need to see that. Curious, I'm really curious, and I have a great desire to report on on on the action, if you like. So I've always done that. I've always because I was alone. My husband at that time, Harry Evans, was actually in
Washington working. It was a predigital era, so I would come back from these black tie dinners and I would be on my own. I hadn't got kids at that moment, and I sat down and just it was like wanting to talk to a friend. And so it was literally sort of dear Dairy almost you know that, I just gushed it all that. Plus I was from London and so I it was all new to me, everything about this place was wild. I had never seen such excess,
such money as such. You know. I was fascinated both in a sense so that it was a little decadent. My dad was a movie producer, he was My mom was Lawrence Olivier's assistant. No, she was Are you kidding me? Oh my god, I'd love to be Lawrence. How long a peasant rogan peasant slave? Am I? She was about five years and then she married my my dad when
she was a young woman. She was She married when he was assistant when she was young, and she then met my father at Pinewood Studios and and they got married, and then she became you could have been your dad, as she played her cards smartly. Actually, more In O'Hara could have been my mother because my father married more
In O'Hara first. Yes, And it's very funny when when I found about ten years ago that more after my father just died and I was feeling particularly connected to him, I saw that Morgan O'Hara was signing books at some bookstore or wasn't it was the opening it was it was her movie, the famous Christmas movie right, which I lyric Street Miracle on thirty fourth Street. So she was
there at the movie house. So I said to my little girl, you know, then we're going to go and see more in O'Hara because she was married to Grandpa, and you know, I would I have never met her, and I really wanted to produce myself. So I went to this thing and there was a big line. I interested myself was some miss O'Hara. I'm George Browne's daughter.
And I thought she was going to say, how wonderful to see you, I mean George, and she sturted around and she said to me that man had absolutely nothing to do with me. I have no desire to meet you. Goodbye. Oh my goodness. Well, so it was tragic, sad, you know, I mean I was. I was aghast, but I have no idea. The backstory made me immediately think, what the hell did you before? Your dad obviously was married to your mother and you and you were born to that family.
Your father had been married to O'Hara, divorced her, and then there's no association with her whatsoever. What are some of the pictures your father produced? Um, he produced Guns of Batasia, that ms Mark Marple's movies. You know with Margaret Rutherford, you had no desire to go into the film business. No, because I kind of your father's making films, he's married to her wisp. You want to go to Tatler God to me editing and producing a very very
similar do you never want to make movies? Vanity Fair Diaries has been brought by has been optioned by Bruno Papandro who did Big Little Lies. So we might see you know that as a screaming video, which would be great for Maybe that's a sort of a toe hold in. I have lots of ideas for films, actually a lot. They're the same things. It's all about wrangling the story, storytelling short storytelling, tracking number material real, making the writer
do the story you want, casting the thing. So I always felt actually the producing and writing were very similar. The story was the prism into an interesting world. I mean, Dominic Dunn stories were particularly in that vein. I mean, he did a wonderful story about Betsy Bloomingdale, Alfred mistress. Alfred Bloomingdale, the founder of a diner's card. His mistress Vicky Morgan was found murdered, and they blamed this guy Marvin Pancos, who beat at a death with a baseball back.
But obviously the tension in the story was was she bummed off? Because there had been this huge palimony case, And so it allowed Nick Dunn to sort of get into the world of the Betsy Bloomingdale society around Mrs Reagan and tell the story of the sort of slightly dark side if you like, of Beverly Hill society. How would you describe Nick Dunn? Though? I mean I I sensed in my tracking of Nick Dunn's career that he
was kind of a certain type of writer. Then he became after that with his own the murder of his daughter and articles like the Bloomingdale When he becomes like Tales of Hollywood, it gets a little pulpy. Well, actually,
he brings a kind of passionate pursuit of justice to it. Actually, so when for instance, he did the story of the class form Bula murder case in which class Won Bulow had been accused of trying to kill his wife, who was then in a coma for Sonny bon Bulow, that was a way for him to get into the world of Newport and that high society. But it also allowed him to to sort of pursue justice on behalf of
the children. So what actually did motivate Nikol, did make him better than Pulpy, was that he he was always trying to plead to solve things for the victim, because you know, he felt himself the victim's rights crusade. And that's what gave his pieces such hard So when you say you want to go into a world which one to just intrigued the hell out of you, you said, there, God, I love this piece. And a lot of the foreign
stories we did, I absolutely loved. I mean, we did a wonderful piece about baby Doc the on into the strange sort of voodooe atmosphere of Haiti at the time. We did wonderful stories about Africa. Alex Schumutov was a
fantastic writer for US. He did the sort of definitive piece about the murder of Diane Fossey, the naturalist, and what he what was so great about that pieces Everyone was writing about her as a great environmentalist who had been sort of kill uh, you know, because of her pursuit of against the poachers, But what it really came out was how troubled she was herself as a woman, and how actually she she really hated the poachers more
than she loved the animals. That this woman was a really disturbed woman actually as the truth, and it was, and it was a very interesting sort of look at this, But how what makes a woman live on the edge like that? So these are the kind of stories that drove me and to make me a sign of story, I have to feel this abiding curiosity is like what is the real story here? Like what are we missing in all of this? And there are some stories which
just grabbed my imagination. I mean I look at someone like Rex Tillerson now and I just think what a great story Rex Tillerson is not because of the obvious things. He's Secretary of State, like what's happening? But I see him as a hugely comic character, you know. I to me, the story is big corporate ceo whoever one is saluted,
you know who, who's got in the boardroom. And now he's stumbled into this completely insane mess, this lunar ban, and he's still playing it as a straight man to be going somewhere where he's just dismissed or ignored or he's under control. Now somebody said about about Tennison, who knows him? To me, he rex runs a very crisp meeting, and I was just thinking, like, a crisp meeting is the opposite of what he's in. I mean, he's now in this rambling, insane asylum, and it's like the message
has gone completely off. I just can't imagine him working for someone else. Wasn't somebody that he had just that he thought was impeccable Tillerson working for him? It just seems like inconceivable to me. Uh So you're at Vanity Fair for what length of time? I was ever eight and a half years, and you know, when I took it over, they had twelve pages of advertising and by the end of course turned into this juggonnaut We had one point two million circulations on fifty pages of ads.
But you know, about a year and a half in new house was actually about to close it. And he was almost like a kind of James Thurber character because he was this short, nervous never she a little man. If you you know, he was completely shy. I mean he wants, you know, very touchingly kind of We were riding home in the car and you know, he said to me, I don't think that I don't really think I have any power. You know, I have no power. And I was thinking, woomen, I said, but say, you
know you are in random house, you know. He said, yeah. But if I told publishers what book to buy, they wouldn't pay any attention to me. And I said, well, well well, look at all the magazines. He said, yes, but you know the magazine editors don't really, I mean I don't think they don't. Could stop me and he said actually, and then he mentioned Mr Shaan, who was the editor of the New York at the time. He said, and I find it very hard to get Mr Sean on
the phone. So I thought it was so touching in a way because here he was this huge mobile but he never of his company his company, and he did love his editors to be stars. I mean, in a way it was great because you know sometimes corporate people are sort of don't like their employees to have attention, and they're sort of you have to be careful because you don't get too much attention. And he loved it.
He loved he said it as being starred. And you know there was me that was Anna Winter, there was I mean, you know, he liked that, and he saw us as his studio. Really, where's all the big money
come in as her own billboards, TV stations, radio? Well, the money really there was him and his brother Donald, and his father Sam, who was another tiny, never shoot little fellow with a lot of drive, you know, built this huge newspaper empire from this New Jersey newspaper he began at the beginning, and then he bought napolis in every town and soon they had this huge newspaper empire.
So the cash cow was the newspapers actually, and his brother Donald ran the newspaper company, and then Sam, the old man began to get social aspirations and one day his wife, legend says, says, you know how much she'd like him to buy a copy of Vogue, And he came back and he bought her missing you how she bought the company, bought her con in us essentially because she had decided she wanted to now be a lady who lunches a little bit, you know, and nothing was
better for that than glossy magazines. So the glossy magazines began to of that way. So I basically decided. He loved magazines. He always had. He was the east lead in the family. Actually, you know, he appreciated art, he was fascinated by glamor and magazine culture. So he was much better fit for the magazines and the newspapers, and he became a really great magazine publisher. Vanity Fair and
Vogue were enormously profitable. They were in the end. Yeah, we took it from I mean, at the beginning Vanity fell lost, fought Hi million dollars, and then I came in and by the time I left it was in profit. And now, of course in after years it's it's a big cash because that his gift that he placed the bet, and he stayed with the bet. He didn't he didn't falter. Yeah, that was what was so great. He stayed with it, and he really backed me. I mean, now there was
a moment of tremor there. I mean a year and a half in, you know, we were very much liked by readers, but the advertisers were lagging and it was still losing money. And I was off in the West Coast about to go on the MERV Griffin Show to talk about this great cover we had on the Reagans Dancing and Kissing, which was one of our great covers, and I suddenly realized that, you know, everybody I was trying to hire. I was getting stalled and I called
up the office and I said, what's happening? And they said, well, you better come back and talk to Mr. Newhouse, which I did, only did discover that he was at the point of folding the magazine and I had to really trust you. I was a ghast. I said, you can't. And I showed him everything I had on the verge. We're on the verge, and he gave us another He said, okay, you've got another year. And in that year we really pulled it out because that's when we had the big
class one. People. Do you think, what do you think it was about you? The guy new House to give you another year? What's it about your gift? Actually wanted it about him, really, because well I showed him what we had. You know, I believed, you believe I believed, and I you know, I called everybody in the company. I just galvanized everybody to just work on him, and I said, you've got to give us. Actually, he said, you've got two years, and I always knew that was
really a year. You know, when they say two years, it's really a year. So when the magazine blasts off under your tenure and becomes this must read for everybody. When does it become a parenty, that's time to go. Well, I'm very restless type. I mean in the same way I left a Tatler After Vanity Fair. I've been there for it and a half years. I had two children. I didn't I didn't want to. I was actually feeling a little restless, but I had the young kids, so
I didn't want to be married to Harold. By now married to Harold, I had a child of three and of war one of one, and I was winning to get restive. I was also kind of tired of the celebrity culture stuff. Actually, well, I got tired of the conversation, which is, what can Madonna do Thursday? Or can she
do Friday? You know she doesn't like the photography. It was began to kind of which was your stock and you had to kill They were all bread and butter, and you know they saw the magazine of course, Vanity Fair or Tina Brown. The second half of our conversation covers live after Vanity Affair. Her first stop was The New Yorker. She was succeeded there by David Remnick. Whom she hired on Here's the Thing. Remnick told me there's no official system for developing future New Yorker contributors, so
you might get lucky. The farm system is the mail. The farm system is whoever sending us stuff. You know, people think I'm kidding around. People email me every day. I probably get fifteen emails a day that go directly to me, because my email is not that hard to figure out. I have an idea. Here's my short story. Now most of them are not going to work. Once in a while, though it happens. Here more stories from The New Yorker's David Remnick had Here's the Thing dot org.
This is Alec bald And and you were listening to Here's the Thing. Tina Brown retired of catering to celebrities at Vanity Fair. She was in the running to be transferred to the new jewel and Condieness Crown the New Yorker. Things weren't going well there, but the old guard didn't want rescuing by the likes of Tina Brown. Rumors were flying rather like the beginning when when I kept hearing about Vanity Fits. So I had bought The New Yorker
in the meantime sign New House. He had got rid of Mr Shawan, the great legendary editor, and put in Bob got Leeb, who's a fantastic book editor, but a bit like his mistake at Vanity Fair. It didn't make him a great magazine energy and the fact that he was a great book is a different thing. And those people who would disagree with you are those people who they were pretty happy with Bob gott Leeber as the editor.
Because we're gonna get to the subject of the resistance, you agree with No, Actually, I think the people at the New Yorker. I mean Bob Gotley was unlucky because he followed a great legend, been there for thirty years, forty years, right, Mr Shawn was one of the great legends. It was Mr Shawn, Mr Shawan, And you had put on white gloves in speed to him. And so Paul vol Gottli then came into the situation where everybody was very upset about now. But then he didn't really know
how to do a magazine. And you know, he did some good things, but so but when I came in, he said, I'd just done a cover with the Vanity Fair with Demi Moore naked and pregnant, and it was something of a sensation. Annie was very civilas wonderful thing we ever worked with, and so they thought, here comes this the girl who did. I'm under the impression that the New Yorker it was divided. I mean, I don't I don't have any empirical dady, but it was divided
into two groups. Those who were elated you were coming to kind of save the magazine and making improve the sales, and those who felt that you weren't. You know, you'd left the Oxford behind and you were more tatler than Oxford exactly. And you know, I understand why they were nervous. Frankly, I mean, why wouldn't they be. But at the very first meeting that I had at the New York Or there was all of this when I was the first woman, obviously because I've only been for it, isn't it all
been men? So I come into this room and there were all of these men sitting around the table and talk about then I talk about that, what's it like for a woman who's in charge. Well, it was in a place like that where I think they were a bit more old guard at the times on these places
here women don't always have a great time. Well, one of the writers, and I think it was kind of endemic, referred to me as the girl and the wrong dress, okay, which really explains in a nutshell the attitude to me, which is, like, what is she doing coming in here this? You know, there's a woman who doesn't understand us. And you know, there was a lot of resistance, and I think some of it was misogynist, There's no doubt about it. They really want I just blaze through it, you know.
I mean you you just like I just rage through it, uh, you know, And I want some of them around too, you know. Actually, because what I found was, you know, one thing, I'm a big believer, and it's really listening to who's there, right. So I didn't go in and do stuff like just for everybody. I mean I did for actually seventy people in the end, but I did listen to who was there, and I really made quick distinctions about who I thought had and who didn't. And
there was some wonderful older people there. I mean, people like John Updyke and Roger Angel and I mean Lillian Ross. These people were absolutely fabulous and golden and they actually did welcome me. The people who didn't welcome me were the sort of fift year old actually who felt their identity depended on the New Yorker. I found that the Greatest Generation group, like Brendan Gill and Roger Angel were confident enough not to feel their whole identity dependent on
the fake IVY if you like. Of the William Shawn calm mantal, I mean John Updyke was uppre a venture. I mean he was sick of doing book reviews. You know, he was quite happy to go off and write about Oscar Night or something. You know, I mean it was it was interesting to me. What did you say to yourself? What needed to change their? Well? What I wanted to do was to hire a bunch of amazing writers who I felt hiring was job one, and I did. I mean I heard David Remney, you know who succeeded me.
I had Malcolm Gladwell, I had Jeffrey Tubin, I had Jane Mayer. I had Anthony Lane from London, John Lar. Wonderful film with John Lar. I don't like saying that because film critics are always kind to me in the point, but Lanes a wonderful writer, wonderful writer, absolutely marvelous. He was only twenty seven when I hired him. You know, I had your own group when the great medical writer and act all Gowandi and Henry Lewis Gates. I mean, I didn't bring in the most amazing writers and they're
all still there. And I also brought in some amazing editors too, And I actually brought in a lot of women. I mean my executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, who is still my managing editor, Pam McCarthy was still there. There were all of these great women that I brought into some people a lot. When you do that, describe without naming names, what's what's that process like? Well, one short and no A smarter of fact, I actually think it, Uh, you really need to be very sensitive when you when you're
hiring people. I didn't always get it right. Sometimes it blows up and it gets it's wrong or I didn't do it right. But when I did it right, I actually think it takes several conversations because what I learned was the first conversation you have to try to explain that this isn't working out, but they don't hear it, and there's a second conversation and then the third conversation you want someone else to have the conversation. But you know,
I do feel keeping dignity is incredibly important. Do you argue on the side of being generous in terms of sefferences and people who they really think they're gonna have this job for the rest of their lives probably don't. One of the things that was so great about new House because I couldn't be generous, and as he let
me be, he was generous. He really was. Actually, I mean that was one of the great things about say he didn't as long, you know, once he decided to move on, there was never an argument about this person is having to hire a lawyer to say I need more. You know. He was very generous like that. He would just say to people when he had my predecessor at Vanity Fair, he said, look, I'm going to fire him, but I'll keep him on for life and I'll tell him he can go to Europe. Do I see you?
I mean, who does that? Honestly, I mean it's pretty unusual. And so Sid was wonderful, like, very very generous, and you know, we had a tough time, you know, kind of getting this thing to work. I mean, it was losing uh twenty million when I took it over. Was that why was that? Where have those readers gone? It aged? You know, something that they had really aged, and we just needed to completely spruce up the up in the windows from the windows. And actually I brought photography into
the New Yorker, which I have never had. I brought Richard avan And to take pictures. I had our Speelman to be one of the cover artists. I've brought in his wife, France wife Mooley to be the art director. So I really brought my visual sense to them. So you bring the tools you have for the other magazines to this with some changes, and I resigned it. I mean we really sort of facelifted it but kept its
kind of purity. But where you have um where you talk about coming from Vanity Fair with an abundance if you will, not exclusively so, but an abundance of celebrity culture, you come into the New Yorker, do you decide you have to have some you need to start to insert a little of that DNA into the New Yorker as well. Had friend actually I did, Yeah, he's excellent, But in fact, the one I would beg to differ about that. Well, we're gonna have an argument about that. That's okay of
his own, Okay, I'll leave that with you. Um. For instance, Jeff Tubin, who I had as our legal sort of analyst. He was an assistant d A at the time, young assistant d A, and I wanted to cover law. When the O. J. Simpson story broke, Jeff actually had had two or three pieces that hadn't worked out, and I was begin to think, oh my god, I made a mistake with this guy. Jeff just talk about The Clintons is one of my favorite books. Such a wonderful writer.
But he went off to l A. I said, why don't you just go and cover this O. J. Simpson thing and see whether this pans out. That story just took ahold of Jeff. He broke news on it, and he became And what was wonderful was he brought his kind of legal rigor to the story, but at the same time it was the great compulsively glitzy story of our time. That's what I think I did bring into the New Yorker DNA was a sense that you know, by doing Jeff Tubin on on on O. J. Simpson.
I kind of set that table, which now today where Rodan Fara can do Harvey Weinstein. It's a legitimate subject matter far and Harvey Weinst That's another tap I'm going. But I want to just I just want to explain what I said about Tad friend is is not a comment on his writing. What I'm saying is I find that most people who write about Hollywood, most people who write about I had this complain about Amy Pascal's husband, who used to write for The New York Times bring wine.
I had this awful contra toomp with him once because I think that everybody that writes about Hollywood, they pull their punches in terms of management the people who are really in charge, I mean people who write about Hollywood. If you really want to write the truth about what's going in Hollywood, you talk about how non creative people have taken over the process from top to bottom. They wouldn't know what a good movie was if it came up and bit them in the ass at the bar
of the Polo Lounge. They know nothing about that. They don't have a creative molecule in their body. Now, it used to be a guy like Zanick Dick Zanick or even his father would so Darryl Zanne. If they sit there and go, I don't know how to make a great movie, but I know people I can recognize people
who can. And they went out there. Uh Metavoy, the great exects, the great heads of production, the great studio heads, and beyond all that were people who they knew who to assemble and say, let's get all of them in a room. I knew who I want. We're all chasing down the same stars as Edith Head with this cinematographer James Wong. How let's get all these guys together and make this great, great movie. Now you have none of that.
People they don't even like movies. But you find and I'm not picking on friend, but a friend, I find him a bit in emic and assigning the blame where it belongs. The actors always take the hit when the movie doesn't work, rather than the fact that the d g A is the most bankrupt. It is the most bankrupt of the guilds. Now, you've got abundant great writers out there with great ideas. You've got tons of great actors who want to work, and you don't have that
many men and women that can direct a movie. You just don't. They don't know what they're doing. Well, it's remarkable how little there is. I mean, that's why streaming videos becomes such a godsend and so fabulous, and that's why all the creativity is going there, right because a tough time in the business speaking for for that reason, which is the people who are picking, you've got to you've got to try to make an appeal to someone to buy something that they have no taste in whatsoever.
What It's tragic. And that's actually why new House was so great because he knew talent and he did like and he didn't want to get in the mix himself, but he knew who to put in place, and it was like, now you run with it, you know, which is something that's very very rare. So how long are you with The New Yorker? I was at The New Yorker for nearly seven years? Did you keep a New Yorker diary? Less off alas? Because it was a weekly and I had a kid, and you know, so it
was much harder for me to do it. And I you know, I regret that I didn't write it with as much kind of intensity and detail that I did Vanity Fair Diaries, so I didn't do as much. And then after six and a half seven years, I've been going to get frustrated there because I always felt The New Yorker should be more by the end, that it
should be more than a magazine. I wanted to see it be a radio show, a book company, because people were always trying to buy the Remnick sat here and did our podcast, walked out the door and started his own podcast. He said in that chair and said, if this moron can do this, I can do it. And he's doing a great I'll never forgive him. And I didn't was no podcast in those days, but I did think exactly that that. Yeah, I thought it should be more media, and I thought it could be like the
HBO of of print. You know, um your phone by the way, you know, no you I would always assume that Tina Brown, someone's ringing constantly, but my daughter texting. But but we would just describe real quickly, how is
it different at the New Yorker. Well, comparing Trash the two, it was much more open warfare against me at the New Yorker at the beginning, you know, because we had this huge kind of pushback from the old guard, expecting that this was going to be me putting Demi Moore and in the magazine, I mean fristus, the cartoonist, Bob Mankoff, he thought that I was going to cancel all of cartoons and just put pictures in, and of course it
was the reverse was true. I actually gave the car Bob Mankoff, I made him cartoon editor, and I actually gave you know, him a whole cartoon issue every Christmas to do. But he had a documentary out of it and got a documentary, and I started the cartoon Bank and all of these things that he's wonderful. He's absolutely First we became the best of friends. But but for the first two or three years it was this kind
of what is she trying to do? But then I think what happened basically was that a lot of the defective left the new amazing people were so good. I mean, when you have people like m Nick and Rick Hertzberg who are brought in and I love him so dearly. I mean, he's the cleverest and the best, and you know that talk. It was like a graft. It was
like a skin graft, right, And there was a wonderful moment. Actually, when I was having a sandwich with John Updyke in the office and before he came, Anthony Lane, the film critics, said to me, oh, here having lunch with John Updyck. I am, He's my hero. I just want to meet him. So I said, okay, well, I'm in the middle of lunch, you know, just knock on the door and I'll introduce you to John. Knock, knock through the And as he comes in, John Updyke jumps up and says, Anthony Lene,
I've been so looking forward to meeting you. It was a wonderful moment because it was you saw the blood exchange had happened, you know, which was at the Older Guarden, And from that moment, really, you know, it all settled down and we were soon the most amazingly exciting. When the time comes to leave the New Yorker, I mean, I'm sure, having taken two magazines and really, well we'll
throw Tattler. Yeah, but but but but here in the U s fantity there in the New Yorker and having tremendous success with them in a new house behind you, what did you fantasize would be next? Well, I had this fantasy of an extended media. Laterally, you see, as I said, I wanted to do radio's books, TV shows out of the New Yorker brand, Sign your House. For all of his wonderfulness, did not get that. That's where he stumbled, actually, because frankly had he done that twenty
years ago. I mean this was I didn't understand where we were heading. He did not understand where we were headed. Conn didn't miss the miss the trick when it came to getting ahead of that curve. I mean, the things that I told side to do in the nineties were the things that they should have done because I was I did see it early, probably too early and too
early for him to see your sound nuts. It was like settled down on do your magazine and like go back to your knittings, Go have lunch with updates, Go have lunch with up that. Yet I was thinking I wanted So along comes a person who has been in the news lately, Mr Harvey Weinstein, who comes to me and says, I want you to come and do a magazine with Mirrormax. You can do books, you can do films, you can do all of these things that you the idea you had want to vack you talk is the
magazine Talk magazine, we just called it. So I said, okay, I'll do this. And I thought that he was the sort of the missing piece of entrepreneurial verve that was going to help me develop these thoughts. And you know, I leapt out of the Ivory Tower into a well. I wanted it to be a rough and tumble thing. I was ready for that. I had been at the Court of Louis the fourteenth, as it were, for seventeen years, and I thought this would be exciting and rugged. And
I'm going to know. How does a new house compared to Harvey Weinstein? Oh my god, I mean, you know, it was like a bad dream. New house was always sort of courteous, always warm, really, and he changed difficult. He was a gentleman. He was generally he could mean, he could be very difficult, he could be very irritating, but he was never abusive or in any way inappropriate. And I find that unbelievable that Harvey was abusive to you. Well, he was actually I mean, I mean yeah, I mean
he basically was. Well he Harvey. The problem with Harvy is here, and I immediately had a completely opposed vision of what it should be. I mean, I wanted to leave The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to do something obviously different from either of them. Right. I had this concept of a literary news magazine that was going to
be like in a European news magazine. I was in love with magazines like Perry, Match and Stern, and I love those magazines, and I wanted to do a European news magazine with a New Yorker quality type face and content with amazing photography like Perry Matt. That was the idea, with a cover with multiple images on it and all of the things that hadn't been really done here. I love those magazines. I did the first couple couple of issues.
They were amazingly good. But when within about two months, I mean, Harvey immediately started to say, I want Vanity Fair with you to just a copy Vanity Fair. I want you to have you know, Matt Damon on the cover. I want you to say completely and I you know.
And it became so frustrating to me because I felt that I was being forced into this kind of celebrity journalism again, but in this wildly unstable environment where Also I was having a very hand fisted way by the hand fisted when it wasn't what I wanted to do, and I found it very very distracting. And hiring and firing was that another point of friction. I have my
own team at first. But I did find, of course that Harvey wanted to go around town of signing things all the time, and I mean that never happened before. The deals that were made by Harvey for for Talk and for the book publisher was flight attendance on private jets, so there was a lot of that. I would run into a person who would tell me that his peace was coming in on Wednesday, you know, and I would say, what peace, you know, and how am I going to pay for it? Because it was also my budget that
was like streaming out the door. So I, you know, I felt extremely frustrated with it, but you know, it was having leapt out of the New York or obviously it was. It was heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking really what happened. Of course, then it didn't go well because you know that it lasted for two years and then actually nine eleven really put the kibosh on it because then advertising disappeared and then you were going to have to have
deep pockets behind you. Did you walk away just was like you've got a car service and took off and never spoke to him again, or was there an actually know, as a matter of fact, you know, I stayed on perfectly okay terms with Harvey after that. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, you know, what happened happened because we have the weird condition where you and I are intersecting here for this interview right when
all this stuff is happening. And I don't think the Weinstein Company should go out of business because there's all these innocent people are going to lose their jobs. Just get a bit of Harvey and Bob. Let someone else take over so that everybody else can have their job. But don't punish innocent people because Harvey is apparently a monster. Well, as a matter of fact, this of what I got here, I got an email from somebody who used to work for Merra Maxi, and she said, I'm absolutely in a
state of shock. She said, now I feel my entire resume has cost me in the light of being this hideously dubious colluder, honey trap bait for for for rapists, and I had no idea this stuff was happening. I'm gonna turn over my car too, because I've gotten a lot of attacks online because I was dear friends and have been dear friends with Jimmy Toback and never once
had a conversation with Jimmy about his sex life. And now those people who come at you about Harvey is the same thing where you're just sitting there going you're not having conversations with people about, you know, the Harvey problem. Well certainly I didn't, you know, you know, one doesn't look at all the people who wrote it, to whom Aberdeen saying it's so terrible what they're saying about your husband,
Anthony Weiner, and you know it isn't true. And then oh my god, it turns out to have been this kind of serial piece and that share as well, you know, and so you you sort of feel your gun shy about speaking up about anybody's other side. So you write the thing about Lady Diana, who I met once and want to do something. She was so much more beautiful and more interesting in person, so much it almost didn't do her justice. She was stunning, stunning, and it was
all about the coloring. I mean it was this piece is gorgeous peach pelvet face and this huge olympid blue feeling eyes and people didn't realize I did. I did, and I always felt like you did. In fact, I had lunch with her in New York about six weeks before she died, and when she walked into the Four Seasons, it was just so she's so stunning, you know, because she's so huge. I mean, she's like this gazelle who's like,
you know, six ft something. It felt, you know, in the shoes and the eyes that were just so enormous, and yet she was so lonely. Talked about loneliness and how you know in August she was dreading August because the children were going off to stay with Charles in pal Moral, and how she she said, nobody wants me to have me to stay. And I said, why what
are you talking about? Everybody wants to have you know, she said, you said the paper RSI calm, and they go through your garbage, and you know, you just said, it's just horrible to have me to stay. She said, I am. You know, I have nowhere to go in August my children, and I just thought how extraordinary it was that she felt that lonely. But it also did explain when you learned of her death, you know, six weeks later or whatever it was, what she was doing
in the south of France. I mean, she was really there because she was so lonely. And along time the al Fayed family, you have what you call all the toys are either planes and the bodyguards, and you know, the chauffeurs, and so Jackie Kennedy marrying on exactly the same. Some of the most prominent figures, I mean, your peers, if you will, in terms of their prominence in the publishing world. Graden is leaving, Robbie Meyer and Jan sold
the business, and I'm wondering it's just technology. I mean, I think digital disruption has become so intense that for many of them it was like, look, I had a great time, and let's leave this now to someone who couldn't just do this reinvention because I did my stuff.
You could have kept going, did you have? Well? No, I decided to start a live media company because I felt that it was no longer about stories and pictures and captions and words, which is what I love to do and had become all about how am I going to get the revenue stream? What is the digital platform? You know, all of that anguish that is about process
as opposed to stories. And so I now to do many of these live events where I can at least showcase incredible stories and put them on the stage and have people watching them, which is what we do with women in the world. Because just magazines cannot anymore survive, so now can't they ask They're actually making a lot of speed trying to do stuff like David Remnick doing his podcast, you know, which is great and they should
be doing a lot more of that. But it's you know, there are all these brands there that now have to be sort of rethought and it's you're doing it against the clock. A challenge for the next generation of Tina Brown's. But the magazine business is different now. Nobody will ever match the power and glamor of Vanity Fair at the height of Brown's reign. Her book is Vanity Fair Diaries. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here is the thing. Two