March 21, 2012 |
Tina Brown was a go-getter, right from the go-getter. And precocious with it. Sharp as a needle, bright as a button. Unstoppable.
She was born in 1953 in – rather unfortunately, considering the stellar international career to come – Maidenhead, but grew up in Little Marlow, much more suitably middle class. Her father was a film producer. School proved a problem for little Broqn, who rather proudly once said that she was “an extremely subversive influence”. Must have been true. She was expelled from three boarding schools for nothing more serious than childish but sharply witty attacks on the Establishment, something she would continue on and off throughout the starry career to come.
She went to Oxford when she was 17, which was precociously young, where she read English Literature but, surely more importantly, cut her journalist’s teeth by writing for the university magazine, Isis, through which she began to develop her life skill of making friends with the right people, including Evelyn Waugh. While still a student, Brown began to write for the New Statesman, a testimony to her skill, not only as a writer but also as a writer of witty prose. It was quite a coup. She also had some success while still a student as a dramatist, winning a drama competition and having a play produced in the commercial theatre. Aged only 21, Harold Evans, the editor of The Sunday Times – and Brown’s future husband – gave her a job on his newspaper. Seven years later, they married.
But before that, in 1979, she was asked to edit Tatler, a stuffy society magazine with a very low readership. She transformed it into one of the wittiest, most irreverent publications in Britain, entirely capturing the spirit of political and social iconoclasm current in Britain at that time. It contained probably the best fashion in a British magazine at that time, with Michael Roberts as fashion editor. He happily sent up fashion ad politics (memorably with Vivienne Westwood as Margaret Thatcher and Rifat Ozbek looking uncannily like Diana Vreeland), alternated with romantically nostalgic shoots styled by Amanda Harlech, frequently using beautiful upper-class public school boys as extras for stars such as Tina Turner. The photographers she used were of the highest calibre, Norman Parkinson and David Bailey among them. The circulation went up from 10,000 to 40,000, not least because Tatler took an almost obsessive interest in Diana, Princess of Wales, and featured her virtually every issue.
Brown had become an international star in media circles but, as is the way in the UK, was virtually unknown elsewhere. That changed when she was called to New York to take over the editor’s seat of Vanity Fair, newly resurrected, having been closed down in 1936. By 1984, she was editor-in-chief, and a fascination for all sophisticated New Yorkers, who invited her to their smart dinner parties as a ‘”personality” who could sing for her supper with bitchy repartee or shrewd political and social commentary, always laced with a sharply sardonic wit.
And it was at one of these dinners that Brown met Dominick Dunne, who told her he was going to California for the trial of the man accused of murdering his daughter. She commissioned him to keep a diary, published it and watched writer and magazine climb to undreamed-of heights. Vanity Fair’s special mixture of gossip, fascination with the wealthy and lawless, Hollywood and serious political commentary was perfectly judged for the urban American reader, making it a major media player, especially strong on the mix of film and music personalities and high fashion captured by the world’s top photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts, who were encouraged to push the boundaries, and did so.
But Brown was a hard-nosed journalist and she made sure that the stories were as punchy as the photographs, getting Dunne to cover the Claus von Bülow murder trial and being first in the field about the breakdown in the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. She achieved a degree of notoriety, but it was mother’s milk to her as she constantly upped the ante, even putting a nude pregnant Demi Moore on the cover. Commercially, Vanity Fair was a huge success, with sales topping 1.2m so it was no surprise that, in 1988, she was named Magazine Editor of the Year in recognition of the fact that single copy monthly sales were hovering around $20m.
Four years later, Brown was asked, and agreed, to try to revive one of America’s most venerable titles: The New Yorker. It was an appointment not without controversy. The outgoing editor accused Brown of achieving what she had at Vanity Fair by “kissing the ass of celebrity”, which might well have been true but nobody at Condé Nast cared about that when they looked at the balance sheets. But, although she introduced many innovations – not least breaking the taboo on using photographs, when she appointed Richard Avedon as the magazine’s first ever staff photographer – The New Yorker proved a hard journal to popularise, probably for no other reason than the fact that it was a “reading” rather than a “flipping” publication, in which words were what mattered to its reader. But, despite that, The New Yorker can certainly be counted as a commercial success under her banner. Circulation leapt up. But so did costs, and each year it was millions of dollars in the red. But, tempted by another offer (from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films) and, no doubt, exhausted by the financial problems, Brown resigned from The New Yorker.
Form there she launched a new magazine called Talk and grabbed the headlines with its first issue with Hillary Clinton on the cover and a long and relatively revealing piece about her husband and the Monica affair, along with other less riveting topics. But 9/11 dramatically affected advertising revenue and Talk folded. It was Tina Brown’s first undoubted failure in a daring and highly original career.
And I, for one, wish Brown had stopped there. She had enjoyed an amazingly successful career that had affected magazine journalism across the globe, had made a lot of money for her publishers and given her undoubted skills full range. But the light has dimmed. She is now nearly 58 and being cheekily iconoclastic – her true forte – is something that only comes naturally to the thrusting young. The energy, life, determination and controversy of the woman once referred to as “Stalin in high heels” are unlikely to be rekindled. But this is Tina Brown, so don’t take any bets on it.
by Colin McDowell
