When the Going Was Good, page 14
The day of the Mailer encounter was traumatic in other respects. Later in the afternoon, Cynthia called to say that our middle son, Max, who was six at the time, had suffered a terrible fall while riding. The horse had stumbled trying to navigate a small jump. Max fell to the ground, and the horse had stepped on his helmet, crushing it. I left the office immediately and drove up to Connecticut. At the hospital in New Milford, Max’s head and the upper part of his face were so swollen that he was almost unrecognizable. I stayed with them for the next two days as the swelling began to reduce and the doctors told us that the danger period appeared to be over. I returned to the office for a day and then went back up to Connecticut Friday afternoon. We stayed by his bedside for the weekend.
* * *
I was constantly worried that I was going to lose my job. The only encouragement I got was from Si. An editor is only as good as the support of his or her proprietor. And here, Si had no peers. If he ever wobbled over his decision to hire me, he never showed it. There was a newsstand in the lobby of 350 Madison run by a slightly quirky husband-and-wife pairing, Margit and Helmut. She was on the large side and he was tall and thin. A Jack Sprat couple, as Aimée used to call them. They were from the old country, though I was never sure which old country. Germany seemed to be the consensus. Margit and Helmut ruled their domain like the Ceaușescus had Romania. Merely reaching for a magazine would result in a booming “Are you going to buy dat?” Most important, they knew everything that went on at Condé Nast long before anyone else did. Their newsstand was on the right just before you turned the corner to go to the elevators. It was impossible to miss.
Just before you got to them, there was one of those old-fashioned black address boards with horizontal seams and white plastic capital letters spelling out executives’ names and their floor numbers. Si’s was at the top. And farther down came the publishers and the editors. Every morning during those first couple of years, I would glance discreetly to my right to make sure that my name was still on the board. Then I’d say hello to Margit and Helmut. I figured they would know first if I was on my way out. I’d be able to gauge my fortunes just by the look on their faces. That’s how tenuous I felt my residency at Vanity Fair was.
Matt Tyrnauer, who had been a young staff member at Spy, and who had written for me at The Observer, came over as an editor and shared an office with Aimée. They were inseparable. I inherited a managing editor in Pam McCarthy, who took to looking at me as one would a dog who had just chewed a favorite shoe. And she had good reason. At Spy, we reported on an incident that took place during the Brown-era Vanity Fair in which two staff members had papered the walls of the office of one of the editors with pictures of naked men. An investigation, led by Pam, was launched to find the culprits. A private eye was reportedly brought in. Suspects were questioned. In the pages of Spy, we referred to it as “the McCarthy Era” at Vanity Fair. Our days together were not to last. A few weeks in, Pam departed for The New Yorker and Chris Garrett arrived as my new managing editor.
Chris had been at Condé Nast Traveler and before that at Tatler. She was and is an incomparable presence, an English rose with the grace and look of Audrey Hepburn and the wisdom of Plato. She had worked for one of my idols, Mark Boxer, the editor of Tatler. Marc, as he signed his pictures, was also a master caricaturist—he had illustrated, among other things, the covers for the paperback edition of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Michael Thomas, the writer, gave me the originals to those covers and then thought better of the gesture. He asked for them back. And I gave them back. But first I made color scans of them, which I have framed in the master bedroom of our house in Connecticut. Anyway, Chris and I have been together, tethered to the editorial masthead, for more than thirty years now.
She is a master of diplomacy, tact, and empathy. The managing editor’s job is to run the operation, calm the staff, and look after a zillion tiny details in order to get an issue out the door once a month. All of which Chris did without breaking a sweat. We used to call her “the Velvet Hammer,” so gifted was she in delivering bad news. We believed that she could fire somebody and receive flowers from them the next day. From that first day on, we spoke pretty much every morning for the next quarter century. Chris would shimmer into the office like Jeeves. You wouldn’t hear any footsteps, she would just be there, looking incredibly composed. Arms at her side was a good sign. Arms folded meant that there was some horrendous issue at the magazine that we needed to sort out. She was quite Sir Humphrey–ish in her mastery of rhetoric and could get me to think her way by some circuitous route that I’d lost the road map for long before. She generally got her way, and in the most pleasant manner possible.
I then brought in Beth Kseniak to handle “communications”—masthead-speak for public relations. Beth was stylish and beautiful, and moved through the hallways like a thoroughbred racehorse. She was also a no-nonsense veteran of the Time Inc. publicity machine. She never sugarcoated bad news but also never lied to reporters when they called about some slipup of ours. Which in the early days were many. She might have pleaded. But she never lied. At the sight of both her and Chris walking my way with their arms folded, my pulse would quicken. It only meant bad news. One holdover I warmed to almost immediately was Wayne Lawson, a peerless editor with a calming manner. I came to rely on Chris, Aimée, Beth, and Wayne—and then Jane Sarkin—not only for giving me advice I probably didn’t want to hear but for words of encouragement that I did.
* * *
I got encouragement from others, including Diane von Fürstenberg and Barry Diller. In 1986, Jann Wenner threw himself a birthday party at Canal Bar, Brian McNally’s bustling new restaurant in SoHo. Jann took over the whole place, covered the ceiling in balloons, and summoned his crowd of bold-faced contemporaries—Barry and Diane, Calvin and Kelly Klein, Billy Joel, Malcolm Forbes, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, Andy Warhol, Fred Hughes, Lorne Michaels, David Geffen, Paul Simon—and me. Jann put me beside Diane. The trail of desecrated reputations and egos at the hands of Spy—which was about to launch—would soon make me a difficult dinner person to seat. But for now, I was a pleasant guest with a nice suit and a willing smile. Diane was a great dinner mate, and from that evening on, we saw a lot of each other and became very much entwined in each other’s lives.
We live near each other in Connecticut, and back when our house didn’t have a pool, we would take the kids over to Diane’s for a swim. Her place was more of a compound than a house, really, with a number of outbuildings, including something I had never seen before: a screening room. Hers doubled as a library. On one side it was floor-to-ceiling with books. Back when movies were still released on giant film reels, she would hire the projectionist from the local theater and have him screen films that had just come out or were about to come out. Her longtime boyfriend was Barry Diller, one of the more charismatic figures in Hollywood and New York. And it was Barry who would arrange for the films to be sent on loan.
Barry had been named the head of Paramount Pictures when he was just thirty-two and ran it for the next decade. He then took over 20th Century Fox and during his time there launched the Fox network. By the time I was made head of Vanity Fair, Barry had left Fox and was thinking about his next move. Diane suggested I go to see him to get his advice. He invited me to have lunch at his house in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. When I arrived, I found him working outside using another thing I had never seen before: a laptop computer. I was nervous about the meeting. Everyone knew that Barry didn’t suffer fools, and I worried that I was precisely the sort of fool he’d find not worth suffering. Also, we had written about him in Spy. I didn’t remember any of the details, but it being Spy and all, my guess is that at times it had not been favorably. He greeted me with generosity as well as a simmering layer of mistrust. I so appreciated the first part of that last sentence. And completely understood the reasoning behind the second part.
In so many circles, Barry and Diane’s friendship validated me. I had asked Diane to come on as a contributing editor when I got the Vanity Fair job and she said yes, and she stayed on the masthead until my final issue.
* * *
Not long into my new job I was surprised to learn that attending fashion shows would be part of my remit as editor of Vanity Fair. I had never been to one before. Fashion shows serve two major purposes: to generate press and to get store buyers to order the things they see on the runway. They rarely start on time. The seating is tight and the benches positively monastic. Editors went to shows out of respect for the designers—or at least the ones who put advertising pages into their magazines. My early days at Vanity Fair happened to coincide with the era of the supermodels. So at the very least, what you were witnessing, clothes aside, was a certified moment in the annals of supermodelry.
My first outing was a Calvin Klein fashion show. It took place in a spare gray space downtown that looked a lot like the clothes on the models. David Geffen was seated beside me. I knew who he was. I knew the music he had championed and the films he had made. He asked me how I was doing, and we started talking, and that developed into what I can only describe as a wonderful, if lopsided, friendship—much like mine with Barry—with him way up on top and me several steps below on the food chain. The thing is, like Barry, David was kind to me when I really needed a friend with wide influence in those early, fragile days at Vanity Fair. And their acceptance gave me a huge boost in confidence.
A fashion event also brought me together with a couple who would become a huge part of my life. I met them in Paris at a summer dinner at Karl Lagerfeld’s vast hôtel particulier during the couture shows. I was there to wave the Vanity Fair flag and indicate to the big Paris fashion houses that we cared about their business. At the Chanel show, I noticed a very attractive couple sitting opposite me—Kelly Lynch, an actress in the ascendant, and her husband, Mitch Glazer, a screenwriter. The designers regularly flew out stars from Hollywood to liven up front rows that were otherwise populated by fashion editors in their black-on-black working kit and New York matrons and the wives of Middle Eastern potentates who could afford the vast expense of a couture gown.
That evening, at Karl’s, I made my way around the tables looking for my place card. I began on the perimeter, figuring I would be seated with the wretched refuse of the fashion business. As I worked my way forward, I finally found my seat. And it was between two of the reigning supermodels of the time, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford. I don’t know about you, but in the presence of such epic beauty, I absolutely freeze. I was completely at a loss for words. I mean, what exactly do you say to a supermodel? I did my best, and was discussing something that seemed to completely bore Claudia when there was a commotion across the room.
Richard Gere and Brian McNally were standing face-to-face, and it looked like one of them might hit the other. Piecing the evidence together the next morning, I found out the reason. Brian had recently closed one of his restaurants, 150 Wooster Street. It had run hot for about two years and then just sort of drifted, as hot restaurants so often do. Richard’s former girlfriend, Sylvia Martins, a Brazilian-born abstract painter, had invested in the restaurant and lost her money, and Richard was after Brian for the loss. (She later married a Niarchos, so presumably this is no longer an issue.) It looked as if Richard was going to slug Brian. Which would have been a strange way for a Buddhist to handle such a situation. It would also, I believe, have left him the worse for wear. Brian grew up on the mean streets of Bethnal Green, in East London, and knows a thing or two about handling himself in a fistfight.
Security personnel separated the two men. Brows were mopped. Seating arrangements were hurriedly changed. I almost wept as Cindy Crawford, then married to Gere, was whisked away from my table, and then Claudia Schiffer. In their place glided the attractive actress and screenwriter from across the runway earlier in the day. Mitch had grown up in Miami and moved to New York to become a journalist and later a screenwriter. He wrote with Michael O’Donoghue and had been close friends with John Belushi. Kelly had made a name for herself with Cocktail, Drugstore Cowboy, and Road House.
We wound up having a wonderful evening, the three of us. But I didn’t see them after that night until the next spring, outside Mortons late on Oscar night. I was getting some fresh air, and they sidled up beside me while they waited for their car. We resumed whatever we had been talking about at Karl’s that night—Brian probably. And we have never really stopped talking. We’ve gone on family vacations together and our children are as close as siblings. Near our house in Connecticut we had a small fishing camp on Lake Waramaug. Like the cottage we had when I was growing up, it provided cheery family summers filled with Evinrude-motor smells, canoeing, and fishing off the dock with the kids using worms or lures. The camp had a bunkhouse with six berths. Mitch, who is not what anyone would call a seeker of wilderness activity, bravely volunteered to stay in the bunkhouse with the kids one night. I had an old bearskin rug in one of the other rooms. Later in the night, I tied the bear’s feet to my hands and with rope strapped the bear’s head over mine. I tiptoed up to the screen window closest to Mitch and began growling and scratching. He turned on the flashlight and rocketed out of bed with a shriek.
Mitch is godfather to our youngest daughter, Isabella—Izzy to us. Her christening was to take place at the church where Anna and I got married near our house in Connecticut. Mitch, who is Jewish, asked what he was supposed to wear to a christening. I told him that the traditional dress at an Episcopalian service was a cassock. He numbed at the thought but asked if I could help get one for him for the ceremony. I called the Vanity Fair fashion department and they said they could get one from a movie prop house. I asked that it be a few sizes too large. On the day of the christening, Mitch came down wearing the cassock. The sleeves fell over his hands and the hem puddled on the floor the way Mickey Mouse’s sorcerer’s had in Fantasia. He was so despondent that a half hour before we were to head over to the church, Anna broke down and told him that I was playing with him and that a suit and tie would do.
Chapter 9.
My Advanced Vanity Fair Education
Going from Spy and The Observer to Vanity Fair was like moving from a youth hostel to a five-star hotel. We had a receptionist in the elevator area who handled calls and directed guests to the correct offices. Her name was Bernice, but everyone called her Bunny. She might have been the most popular person on the floor. A lovely woman in an English maid’s uniform came to make fresh coffee every few hours. My office had an adjoining private bathroom so luxurious that when a colleague from Spy came up to visit one day, she said it looked like Mitzi Gaynor’s. At Vanity Fair, as I mentioned, I had not one but two assistants.
When traveling on business, I stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Suites, room service, drivers in each city. For European trips, I flew the Concorde. I took round-trip flights on it at least three times a year for almost a decade. That’s something like sixty flights. My passport picture was taken by Annie Leibovitz! The top editors were given a car and driver in the city. My own driver, a charming man named Sergei Boulii, was with me for almost my entire time at Condé Nast. He had grown up in Siberia and spent time in the Russian army—and it showed. He had huge forearms and a tree trunk for a neck. With short-cropped thick blond hair—almost white—he looked a bit like Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love. He may have seemed like someone you didn’t want to mess around with—but once you got to know him, it was impossible not to be warmed by his lovely smile and gentlemanly manner.
Staff members could expense their breakfasts—not a working breakfast with a writer or photographer. Just breakfast. Large dinners at home were catered. Flowers went out to contributors at an astounding rate, sometimes just for turning a story in on time. One staff member who was a holdover from the old regime would get so depressed at the mere thought of my being there that she would send flowers to herself just to perk up her spirits. On the company account, of course.
There was much in the way of financial secrecy. I was mystified at first about my pay arrangement. Half my salary came in a check from Condé Nast. The other half came from the Staten Island Advance—the original pillar of the Newhouse empire. On matters involving money, I was instructed to see Paul Scherer. Paul’s accounting firm was in Midtown. The main floor of the operation was the size of a small ballfield, with row upon row of desks stretching out into the distance, like they did in Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment. There were hundreds of workers grinding away at adding machines. The firm had one client: the Newhouse family.
I had lunch twice a year with Paul, either at the Four Seasons or at Da Silvano. He was a three-martini man from the old school. And experience taught me to make any sort of request at the end of the meal rather than the beginning. His wife, Janice, was a formidable creature who worked in the city’s public school system. She was walking into the Condé Nast Building on Madison one day when a group of activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were outside protesting Vogue’s slavish affection for fur. Janice was wearing her mink.
