INTERVIEW – TINA BROWN – founder of The Daily Beast and former editor of Vanity Fair, and author of new book “The Vanity Fair Diaries”
- TINA BROWN is an award-winning writer and editor and founder of the Women in the World Summit. Between 1979 and 2001 she was the editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. Her 2007 biography of the Princess of Wales, The Diana Chronicles, topped the New York Times bestseller list. In 2008 she founded The Daily Beast, which won the Webby Award for Best News Site in 2012 and 2013. Queen Elizabeth honored her in 2000 as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to overseas journalism, and in 2007 she was inducted into the U.S. Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. She founded the Women in the World Summit in 2010 and launched Tina Brown Live Media in 2014 to expand Women in the World internationally. She is married to the editor, publisher, and historian Sir Harold Evans and lives in New York City.
- THE BOOK: “THE VANITY FAIR DIARIES: 1983-1992” by Tina Brown. Ms Brown literally scribbled entries into a blue school notebook during her years running Vanity Fair, excavating the notebooks years later, and compiling them for this book. Upon getting the job to run Vanity Fair in 1983, at the age of just 29, Englishwoman Brown’s introduction to the world of media in NYC was on the cab ride from Kennedy Airport, where she heard Dr Ruth on the radio describing how best to perform oral sex. When she took over Vanity Fair, it was tens of millions of dollars in the red, and had a circulation of 250,000. When she left, she had doubled its ad pages, and increased circulation by one million. She is credited there for performing the art of the mix, the perfect blend of high and low, Hollywood and high culture, clever fashion and Eurotrash, true crime and literary recollection. Turning point was in 1985, where Brown had scored for VF a photoshoot at the White House with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. When the First Couple wearing black tie breezes into the room, the photographer starts playing a recording of Sinatra’s “Nancy (with a Laughing Face,” and the Reagan’s, taken aback, begin dancing. And there’s a kiss. And the photographer is clicking away. The spread changes the magazine’s fortunes. The diaries include a great deal about office politics and Conde Nast, backstabbing, sucking-up, fear and loathing. She heaps praise on people she likes, and savages those she doesn’t. Andy Warhol and Roy Cohn she calls “the two most amoral men of our times.” Aging bad boy movie producer Robert Evans is the nearest thing to the devil. Donald Trump comes up often within the diaries. One such entry, at a charity event at Tavern on the Green. One of Brown’s writers, Marie Brenner, had done a piece on Trump where she reported he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in his bedroom. At this event, Trump walked behind the writer, and poured a glass of wine down her back. She does believe that his fake news charges and war on the press is reviving journalism.
