When the Going Was Good, page 16
An article could be killed for various reasons. Perhaps it didn’t meet expectations—although that was a rare occurrence given the caliber of writer I worked with. Perhaps in the course of closing our story another magazine published one on the same subject that was just as good—this was another reason to kill it. For writers not on contract, I had a rule that I wouldn’t break, even when the fortunes of magazines everywhere began their slide: I never paid a kill fee—a staple of the business. A kill fee meant the writer generally got about a quarter of the amount the story was assigned for if it didn’t run for one reason or another. I had been a writer in my recent, previous life, and I knew just how brutal the whole ordeal was and how most in the trade lived from assignment fee to assignment fee. Whether we ran the story or not, the writer got paid in full.
The editor’s job can also be likened to that of a choirmaster. You have all these disparate voices. It’s the editor who must somehow join the gifted soloists together in an issue to form a sort of choral harmony. Some writers—especially the ones who had been editors in the past—were terrific at coming up with their own story ideas. Others relied on me and the other editors to come up with the ideas. Marie Brenner, one of my favorites, and a master at the long-form journalism we practiced, had a habit of coming in with ideas that I thought were less than inspired. On a couple of occasions, I got her off her notion by telling her that she was a home-run hitter and that even if she did a brilliant job on the story she was suggesting, it could never be more than a double. You should never step up to the plate unless a home run is a possibility, I would tell her. Marie would leave the office saying how right I was and a day or two later we’d come up with an idea that would allow her to hit another home run. Marie’s body of Vanity Fair work was extraordinary. She produced one explosive story after another, many of which were turned into films, including Michael Mann’s 1999 film The Insider, and Clint Eastwood’s 2019 film Richard Jewell. Writers like Marie, Sebastian Junger, Michael Lewis, Maureen Orth, and Bryan Burrough, all of whom crafted journalism like novelists, became vital parts of the Vanity Fair stable. They wrote their stories like mini novels.
Bryan was a perfect practitioner of this form of journalism. He was also the second writer I hired after Christopher. Bryan had spent almost a third of his life—he was then just thirty-one—at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a star investigative reporter. He was a straight-shooting Texan and, along with his Journal colleague James B. Stewart, was one of the most acclaimed business reporters of his generation. Out of a series he produced for the paper on the $25 billion takeover of Nabisco—one of the ultimate spectacles of Wall Street avariciousness in the 1980s—came Barbarians at the Gate, a huge bestseller, which he wrote with fellow Journal reporter John Helyar. Bryan had just written, when I hired him, Vendetta, about James Robinson III, then the head of American Express, and the irrational lengths the company went to in order to discredit the financier Edmond Safra.
Bryan didn’t really see himself as a business writer, though. He saw himself as a general nonfiction narrative writer. You could get a version of the narrative from public documents and research, but to really get into the characters, you need somebody on the inside to guide you along. Some writers love to check in every few days or every week, but Bryan was like a short-order cook. You gave him the assignment. If he accepted it, he just disappeared for six weeks and then a manuscript would land on your desk. We rarely talked between the time of assignment and delivery. He just went off and did it.
The masthead grew and grew. Very few people left the magazine whom we didn’t want to leave. In my early days, the roster included Bob Colacello, a wonderful writer, social observer, and reporter, and Maureen Orth, based in Washington, who wrote an investigation, soon after I arrived, that broke the story of Michael Jackson’s serial sexual abuse. Michael Lewis joined Vanity Fair after the turn of the century and produced some of the most inventive magazine writing of the time.
Over the years we corralled some of the best writers, photographers, and illustrators in the magazine business at the time. Among the essayists or specialists were Christopher, A. A. Gill, James Wolcott, Fran Lebowitz, Michael Kinsley, Amy Fine Collins, Gore Vidal, Paul Goldberger, and Laura Jacobs. The battering ram of reporters included Robert Sam Anson, Judy Bachrach, Peter Biskind, Kara Swisher, Buzz Bissinger, Howard Blum, Patricia Bosworth, David Halberstam, Frederic Morton, Nina Munk, Mark Seal, Ingrid Sischy, Evgenia Peretz, Emily Jane Fox, Leslie Bennetts, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, William Langewiesche, Mark Bowden, Kevin Sessums, Sally Bedell Smith, Nick Tosches, Carl Bernstein, Evan Wright, Nancy Jo Sales, Lili Anolik, Jim Windolf, the partnership of Donald Barlett and James B. Steele, William D. Cohan, Bethany McLean, Michael Wolff, Sarah Ellison, Kurt Eichenwald, David Margolick, William Prochnau, and Suzanna Andrews. I was especially pleased that so many Spy and Observer hands wrote for Vanity Fair, including not only Kurt but also Walter Kirn, John Heilpern, Ned Zeman, George Kalogerakis, Elissa Schappell, Henry Alford, Matt Tyrnauer, Bruce Feirstein, Bruce Handy, and David Kamp.
The photographers on the masthead were the best you could find anywhere in the world: Annie Leibovitz, Jonathan Becker, Bruce Weber, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Mario Testino, Mark Seliger, Snowdon, Todd Eberle, Larry Fink, Patrick Demarchelier, Harry Benson, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Jonas Karlsson, Mary Ellen Mark, Brigitte Lacombe, Michael O’Neill, and Dafydd Jones. For illustrators we had Bruce McCall, Ed Sorel, Hilary Knight, Tim Sheaffer, and Robert Risko. Great word rates certainly didn’t hurt the assembly of this formidable roster. If Si wanted a writer or a photographer (or an editor, for that matter), he went after what he wanted. And more often than not, he got it. Once, in an annual contract negotiation with Annie, Vanity Fair’s principal photographer, it came down to a $250,000 difference between what her agent demanded and what we were willing to pay. “Oh, give it to her,” Si told me finally. “We don’t want to nickel-and-dime them.”
* * *
Dominick Dunne was a significant element of the franchise that I inherited and was, for a long time, a huge asset to the magazine. He could be prickly—especially to the younger staff, which I was not fine with. But we needed him, and, to a great extent, he needed Vanity Fair. The magazine’s readers devoured his monthly dispatches from the 1993 trial of the Menendez brothers—two rich kids from Southern California who shot their parents as they watched TV and ate ice cream—and he would soon become perhaps the most famous print journalist in the world for his monthly and ongoing and knowing coverage of the O.J. Simpson courtroom circus.
One thing Nick brought to these murder stories was a defined moral stance. He wasn’t objective, like most crime and courtroom reporters. He was there to defend the rights of victims. This impulse went back to the tragedy of his daughter Dominique, who was murdered by her boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney. Sweeney was convicted of the murder and served a total of three and a half years in prison. Writing about the case—Nick’s first story for Vanity Fair—had brought him back from a failed career as a film producer. The narrative arc was one that Hollywood would appreciate, as he went from alcoholism, a breakdown, and the death of his daughter to a new career as a reporter and television star.
Vanity Fair writers like Nick were paid like no other writers. He was well on his way to earning half a million dollars a year, plus generous expenses and months of free and continuous accommodation at the Chateau Marmont or the Beverly Hills Hotel during the Menendez and O.J. Simpson trials he covered for us and later the trial of the music impresario Phil Spector, who shot a young actress, Lana Clarkson. We treated our stable of writers like the stars they were. This meant assigning them to diligent, talented editors and dispatching flowers or bottles of scotch at regular intervals. I bought Nick the same Christmas gift every year: a dozen square dark blue Smythson notebooks with his name embossed on the covers. Each one had about two hundred light blue pages. These books became a hallmark of his during the O.J. trial, as he made his copious notes. Nick had filled them all by the end of the trial, and I had to give him his next Christmas batch early that year.
* * *
Newsstand sales were a monthly measure of a magazine’s success in those days. When the numbers were good, they kept Si’s lieutenants off my back. I cared about the quality more than the sales, and above all, I wanted readers to read. It was the covers, though, that sold the magazine. For the subjects of those covers, movie stars were for the most part the lingua franca of the global newsstand. And Vanity Fair was sold all over the world. Each country had its own music stars, political stars, and literary and artistic lights. But movies, at least back then, were the element of the culture that were universally acknowledged. Tom Hanks was not just an American film icon; he was an international film icon.
The covers and their fraught celebrity shoots were the tasks I found to be the most taxing and dreary part of my job. Some people will tell you that there’s a “science” to creating a cover that will sell—that there are colors you should use, words you should use, numbers you should use. I thought this was all nonsense. The company at one point plied us with consultants. We met with them. It was a forced march, certainly, and most of their suggestions were painfully obvious. Long lists of celebrities would be passed around, ranked by the degree to which the public “loves” or “hates” them—as if that was some sort of surefire guide. At the end of the day, we thanked them and resumed trusting our instincts. I’ve always felt that one of the reasons there are editors is because the public doesn’t actually know what it wants. Nobody knew they needed a smartphone before Steve Jobs introduced it. With magazines, the editor’s job is to be consistent but not predictable in covers and to regularly deliver surprises. Sometimes a cover you expect to be a big hit turns out to be a dud, and vice versa.
Jane Sarkin, Vanity Fair’s features editor, was our Hollywood and show-business conduit. She booked—wrangled, as they say—pretty much every cover. She also, along with Krista Smith, our West Coast editor, organized the photo portfolios embedded in all of our Hollywood issues. Jane cultivated and dined with agents and publicists. She described herself—when she ended up on TV for one of her covers—as a very ordinary girl from New Jersey. But Jane wasn’t ordinary; she was exceptional. She had started as a receptionist at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and rose, she would say, because while she was working, most of the rest of the staff was in the basement doing coke and having sex. Jane loved the world of movie stars and celebrities, and they trusted her.
Jane had exceptional stamina as a celebrity handler and ego tamer—skills that came in useful when keeping agents, publicists, and overbearing managers at bay. She also kept them away from me, for which I will be eternally grateful. In addition to all of this, Jane served as Annie Leibovitz’s full-time in-house connection, which was not the easiest of tasks. Annie was as tough on those around her as she was on herself. What I appreciated about Jane was that, despite the operatic drama surrounding her job, she never ever came to me with a problem, only with a solution.
Among her gets was the first picture, taken by Annie, of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s baby, Suri. It’s hard to imagine now that this was a great national obsession. But in the spring of 2006, it was. Because the couple hadn’t wanted publicity for their newborn child, rumors and conspiracy theories built to a fevered pitch: they hadn’t actually had a baby; they had, but it had been taken away by the Scientologists; or, alternatively, there was a baby, but it wasn’t Katie’s. Or Tom’s. In 2006, he was the biggest star in Hollywood, and the search for Suri was Jane’s big truffle hunt. She had worked on many covers with Tom and, after a while, she got the exclusive. He invited Jane and Annie to Telluride, where they spent a week doing the story on Suri in great secrecy. Jane wrote the cover article herself. We were so concerned about a leak that we sent Annie’s pictures to the printers chained to the wrist of a security guard. The pictures were stolen anyway by someone at the plant who tried to peddle them to the papers. We found the person and shut that operation down. With a fair amount of padding, we managed to somehow spread the Cruise “family album” over twenty-two pages. Looking back at it now, I honestly find it difficult to understand what all the fuss was about.
I would regularly get Christmas gifts from Tom. One year he sent me a document in plexiglass with a base that allowed it to stand upright on a surface. Printed on the document were some twenty tenets of Scientology, including “To increase the numbers and strength of Scientology over the world” and “To make this world a saner, better place.” We had an L-shaped dining banquette in the kitchen of our house in the Village, where we had moved after the Dakota, and as a sort of joke, I put the tenets alongside the books that sat on the shelf that ran along the perimeter of the banquette. We had any number of people over for lunch or dinner over the next two years, and not once did anyone mention the Scientology edicts. Anna and I realized later that friends must have left our place suspecting that we were under Scientology’s control. One year, for a charity event, Tom invited us to sit at his table. We said yes and arrived at the venue and discovered that we were seated not only with Tom but also with David Miscavige, the head of Scientology, and Anne Archer’s son, Tommy Davis, who had something to do with Scientology’s Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. This weirded us out a bit. But they were all very pleasant, and blessedly, dinner was not followed by anything in the way of recruitment attempts.
Chapter 10.
The Great Billionaire Proprietor
Si Newhouse knew what he was doing. He spent what had to be spent and he wanted to make it show. He was also a gambler. After Si bought The New Yorker in 1985, he hung in there for decades taking huge losses before finally, under David Remnick, sometime in this century, it resumed profitability. His biggest wager was the relaunch, in 1983, of Vanity Fair, which had been dormant since 1936. The magazine lost close to $100 million before it slipped into profit under Tina Brown. It was just on that turn to profitability when I washed up on its doorstep. Si didn’t want to lose money; he wanted Condé Nast to be profitable. But his slice of the Newhouse empire, Random House and Condé Nast, were like two small skiffs in a sea of tankers. The major moneymakers in the Newhouse stable were the newspapers and the cable businesses. Those were run by Si’s younger brother Donald. The two were incredibly close and would have dinner most Sunday nights at Sette Mezzo, on Lexington between 70th and 71st, where they discussed aspects of the family’s sprawling businesses.
Donald’s portion of the empire may have brought in the big money, but Si’s Condé Nast was the glamorous part that kept members of the family on the lists for the fashion houses of Paris and Milan and got them good tables at the better restaurants in New York and beyond. Condé Nast and its collection of carriage-trade magazines was the beautiful jewel that Si both inherited and built. And what he loved about Condé Nast were the magazines themselves, particularly Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker. I do believe that great companies are built around owners or leaders who truly appreciate what they make and sell. In Si’s case, he loved magazines, their heft, their look, their quality. In Si, I had stumbled on the greatest billionaire magazine proprietor of all time.
When I arrived in New York in the late 1970s, Condé Nast was a third-tier publisher. Time Inc., with Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, People, and Life, was the top of the heap. Then came Hearst, with Esquire, Town & Country, and Harper’s Bazaar among its titles. And then way down below, there was Condé Nast, with Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Glamour. The Condé Nast magazines were beautiful, but nobody took them or the company seriously. Si changed all that. Beginning in the early 1980s, he launched or acquired Self, GQ, Wired, Details, W, Architectural Digest, Gourmet, and Bon Appetit. His relaunch of Vanity Fair was, at the time, the biggest, most electrifying magazine start-up in ages. I wrote an application letter to Leo Lerman, the Condé Nast veteran who was made editor when Richard Locke, the magazine’s first one, had been shown the door after just four issues. Leo, who only lasted a few issues himself, wrote back, saying he would have loved to have met with me, but he, too, was headed for the door.
Si brought Tina Brown over from London to run the ship. By the time Si bought The New Yorker in 1985, he had turned Condé Nast into the dominant magazine company in the country—and with his cousin Jonathan’s expansion of the business throughout Europe and Asia, the dominant magazine company in the world. The week I started, Si asked me if I would like his bound volumes of the Crowninshield-era Vanity Fairs. They had belonged to Crowninshield himself. Si had sold his place in Palm Beach and these were part of the family belongings that would be coming north. Si was explicit in telling me not to use them as a guideline for my Vanity Fair. But he thought it would be instructive to get a grasp of the full history of the magazine. I still have those beautifully bound editions at our place in Connecticut.
Magazines are expensive propositions, and they survive and thrive on the advertising pages their publishers sell. Si kept a close eye on what was coming in. When a new issue of one of his magazines came out, he would go through it with his rubber finger, tallying the advertising pages on yellow legal pads with a thick Sharpie, the way prisoners count days in a cell—four vertical lines and a diagonal slash for the fifth. His father, Samuel Sr., had launched the family business with the Staten Island Advance, a daily that covered the sleepy New York borough of Staten Island. That’s why the company that owns Condé Nast is called Advance Publications. Sam Sr.’s wife was named Mitzi. She was petite and trim and a beautiful dresser who favored Dior and Chanel. One day in 1959, Sam came home and told Mitzi that he’d just bought her favorite magazine. “Which one?” she asked. “Vogue,” he replied. She at first thought he meant a copy of the magazine. He corrected her by saying that he had paid $500,000 for all of Condé Nast. Si told me that, in fact, his father had made a mistake. When he got to the office the next morning, he realized that he’d paid $5 million for it. Which still turned out to be one of the great bargains in the history of publishing.
