When the Going Was Good, page 20
I had met Daphne in the past, but really I didn’t know her all that well. I got in touch and we arranged to have lunch at the Monkey Bar, which I was then part owner of. We sat in one of the booths in the front room of the restaurant, the part with old monkey murals, red-checked tablecloths, and a ’50s-era television that played episodes of Sergeant Bilko on a continuous loop. Daphne entered looking otherworldly. Big head of black-and-white hair: black on one side, white on the other. Like Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, but with vaster dollops of beauty and glamour. She carried herself with an aura of assuredness as she approached me—the way a shark handles itself in the presence of an anxious seal. We engaged in some pleasant chitchat and at one point I mentioned that Jonathan thought she might be a good candidate for a contributing editor’s slot. I thought this would please her.
She shook her head and said she couldn’t possibly take on new duties. She had too much on her plate. I was a bit surprised, as I just assumed that Jonathan had broached the subject with her before he wrote to me. What to do?
“Really,” I said. “What are you working on?”
“Gloves,” she replied.
“Really,” I said again. I wasn’t quite sure where this was going, so I mumbled something to the effect that perhaps we could do a little something on her glove collection in Vanity Fair.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
I hmmed for a moment and then asked, “What sort of gloves?”
At which point she explained that she had made just one.
“As a sort of prototype?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I’m only making one.”
Well, this threw me a bit. I could feel my head swimming.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“It’s made of gold and diamonds,” Daphne replied.
Lost. Completely lost. Drowning at sea.
“Interesting.” I said. Then, trying to advance the conversation, I added, “Well, perhaps we could use it in one of our photo shoots.”
“Oh no, that wouldn’t be possible,” she replied.
Lost. Taking on water.
“Um, why not?”
“Because it only fits one person!” she replied as if explaining an elementary aspect of science to a particularly thick schoolboy.
Completely at sea here. Not enough air in the room. Losing consciousness.
“Oh, well then, perhaps we could photograph you wearing the glove?”
I caught the attention of a waiter and made a discreet Can I have the check? scribbling motion in the air. Daphne caught me mid-signal and I pulled my hand down.
“That would be a possibility,” she said. “But of course, it would have to be a cover.”
I regret to report that the Vanity Fair masthead was never blessed with Daphne Guinness’s name. And the subsequent covers of the magazine went Daphne-free. And glove-free.
Chapter 12.
A Charm Offensive and the Oscar Party
When I was working at Time in the early 1980s, I was dispatched to Los Angeles to cover the Oscars. The magazine had more seasoned, better-connected people out there to write up the actual ceremony and the results. I was there to vacuum up a bit of color, a job for which I was woefully ill-equipped. After I arrived, I unpacked my things and realized that I hadn’t brought a notebook or pen. So I folded and then tore in quarters three or four sheets of the hotel stationery and pocketed the room pencil. Jim Kelly came out as well, and we made plans to meet up with Alessandra Stanley, then one of the correspondents in Time’s Los Angeles bureau. Alessandra took us to dinner at Musso & Frank, that glorious grill on Hollywood Boulevard that is as much a symbol of the dusty old studio town as you could find outside George Cukor’s living room or Tom Mix’s cowboy boots.
I had somehow been assigned an enormous suite at the Chateau Marmont, with a vast living room and three sets of French doors leading out onto a long terrace. I learned later that they thought I was the actual editor of Time. Jim and Alessandra and I gathered in the room for drinks while I got dressed in a midnight-blue dinner jacket with a thin shawl collar that I had bought for $5 at a secondhand shop in the Village. I went off to the Oscars and Jim and Alessandra stayed in and watched the awards on television—which, based on my limited experience, is much more fun than watching from up in the nosebleed seats of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where they were then held. After the ceremony, Alessandra and Jim and I met up for a drink at Tramp, then a fashionable watering hole. The big after-party for the awards in those days was the one organized by Irving Lazar, one of the first people with the job title of “superagent.” He was short, bald, and owlish, with round black oversize glasses. He had been given the nickname “Swifty” by Humphrey Bogart. To my mind, if you’re going to be given a nickname, having Humphrey Bogart as the donor would be a badge of honor. Not so for Lazar, who reportedly hated it.
Swifty, as everyone nevertheless called him, essentially invented the idea of a viewing party. The first one was held at the Bistro Garden in 1964, the year Tom Jones won the award for Best Picture. The guest list was populated by the cream of old Hollywood. And in the style used by columnists of the day to refer to them, the invited included the Gregory Pecks, the Henry Fondas, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Michael Caines, and the Billy Wilders. The guests watched the ceremony during dinner on televisions placed throughout the room. Once the Oscars were over, the winners from the awards, along with the audience rabble, made dutiful cameo appearances at the Governors Ball—then and now a dreary industry affair. After that, statues in hand, the chosen few hightailed it to the Bistro Garden to kick off their shoes, see Swifty, and preen among their equals and lessers.
Jim and Alessandra and I decided that this was the place we needed to be. After perhaps one too many drinks at Tramp, we set off to see if we could talk our way into Swifty’s party. We all had Time press cards and we looked eager, if green—both in the professional sense and, by that time of the evening, around the gills. We made it past the first checkpoint and were about to gain entry to this Valhalla of old Hollywood glamour when a strong arm stopped us at the door, turned us on our heels, and pointed us in the direction of the street.
* * *
When I got to Vanity Fair, I got in touch with Swifty. I asked him to lunch, and he accepted. I don’t think he quite knew what to make of me. I was fascinated by his clients and flooded him with questions. At one point or another, Swifty had handled the careers of many of the titans of American letters in the middle part of the last century. The list is long, and it included Tennessee Williams, Irwin Shaw, Vladimir Nabokov, William Saroyan, and Truman Capote. He had also managed the careers of Ira Gershwin, Noël Coward, and Cole Porter—and one of my hero of heroes, the playwright Moss Hart, whom I admired not only for his enchanting memoir, but for the plays he wrote with George S. Kaufman, notably The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take It with You. I was a sponge for anything about any of them. Swifty must have looked kindly, if quizzically, upon me, because the next year he invited me to attend his vaunted Oscar party.
Swifty’s party had, by this time, moved from the Bistro Garden to Spago, the restaurant on the north side of Sunset owned by Wolfgang Puck. He still held it to about 150 guests for the dinner viewing party. Spago, unfortunately, was divided into two rooms. Clearly there was an A room and a B room. The A room was for Swifty’s old guard of Pecks and Fondas and assorted Hollywood aristocrats. The B room was for not-quite headliners, a few industry figures, and people like me. I didn’t know anyone at the table I was assigned to, and so while all eyes were on the television screens, I was able to study Swifty as he made his rounds through the two rooms like a prison guard inspecting the exercise yard. He literally shouted at people who wanted to table-hop or get up and take a bathroom break during the telecast. “Sit down!” he would bark. Or sometimes, “Shut up.” It was not what you would call a relaxed atmosphere.
After Swifty died, in December 1993, I called in Wendy Stark, our West Coast editor, and Hamilton South, our special projects editor, to float the notion that perhaps we might pick up the slack after Swifty’s death. We had the resources and the aesthetic, and, I believed, we appreciated the history of Hollywood more than the people who actually worked and lived there. I was still on a back foot in those days and pretty desperate for anything that might dig me out.
The timing on our part was not auspicious. Nobody, it seemed, cared much about the Academy Awards anymore. Swifty and his party had been fading. Young stars had grown tired of the awards circuit. Grunge was the fashion of the day, and getting dressed up was considered infra dig. Academy members avoided the ceremony in droves, and Hollywood had turned its back on one of its trading assets: glamour. I thought this was a mistake. Glamour, or even the more prevalent ersatz glamour you found in Hollywood then—and now—was a vital part of the industry’s allure and currency. I thought if we told the story of Hollywood and its glamour and fabulous history and excess to the current stars and creative engines, we would have perhaps a moderate chance of success.
Growing up in Canada, movies were a window into the world of adult drama, comedy, and sophistication. Westerns, war movies, Dust Bowl dramas, screwball comedies: I loved them all. I had a great love, especially, for the early days of Hollywood. From books and magazines, I knew who everybody was, I just didn’t know the people themselves. I figured that I would be a safe host in that, as much as I liked movies, I didn’t want to be in the movie business.
It helped that Si also adored movies. Most nights, he and Victoria would be watching a film at home, flanked by the naked Freud and the naked woman with her legs apart. Or they would have an early dinner and see some forgotten classic at the Angelika down on Houston Street. Si also had close friends out in Los Angeles, including David Geffen; Terry Semel, then cohead of Warner Bros., and his wife, Jane; and Disney CEO Michael Eisner and his wife, Jane. I figured that he would appreciate the idea of Vanity Fair slipping into Swifty’s velvet slippers. At the same time, I didn’t want to embarrass him out there with a flop of an evening. We had very little time to prepare. Swifty died in December. The 1994 Oscars would be held the third week of March. We had less than three and a half months to pull together the party for Hollywood’s biggest night of the year.
For a venue, I wanted a place with a single room, so there would be no A and B delineation. I wanted it to be relatively tough to get in, but with no gradations of status or power once you were inside. Everybody would be treated the same. And I wanted good food and wine. The reigning power restaurant at that time in Los Angeles was Mortons, owned by Peter Morton, the impresario behind the Hard Rock Cafe. Monday was the big night at the restaurant going back years. Celia Brady, our pseudonymous Hollywood columnist at Spy, used to sign off her dispatches with a breezy “See you Monday night at Mortons.”
In those days, the Oscars were held on Monday nights, so the location seemed fitting. The restaurant itself was a good-sized single room with green leather banquettes along one wall and a Francis Bacon triptych at the far end. I asked Hamilton South to call Peter to see if we could book it for March 21, the night of the Oscars. He reported back the next day with some bad news. Peter had already promised it to his best friend, Steve Tisch, a producer—and a member of the Tisch real estate family. After the Larry Tisch “dwarf billionaire” episode in Spy, the Tisches were certainly not in my corner. But I’d met Steve before, so I called him and suggested we do that first party together. He agreed.
There was immediate competition from Tina Brown, who decided to stage a splashy New Yorker lunch a few days before our first Oscar try. We were staying at the Bel-Air, and unfortunately our room looked out over the lawn where The New Yorker’s marquee was being erected. Every day I watched as the tent went up, and then after the lunch, I watched as the tent was dismantled. The party had caused such distress to the lawn that the hotel ripped up all the grass to make way for new sod. For two days, it was a brown ugly stretch of dirt—to me, it looked like it might be a worrisome metaphor for our own outing a few days on.
I decided to make that first Oscar dinner intentionally small in scale. My feeling was, and is, that if you are in uncharted waters, as we most certainly were, and there is a chance of failure, you want as few witnesses to the disaster as possible. We invited a hundred guests for dinner to watch the awards on television screens positioned around the room, and another hundred for the party afterward. For the dinner part, we invited the best of old Hollywood and the best of new Hollywood, and a mix of writers, artists, musicians, and other members of the culture complexes of New York, London, and Europe, including Billy and Audrey Wilder, Mick Jagger, David Hockney, Gore Vidal, Gene Hackman, and Nancy Reagan. That year’s Oscar attendees came after the ceremonies, including Robert De Niro, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson, and Prince.
Sara Marks, who organized the event and indeed handled all events for me over the next quarter of a century, ran the planning and execution like a field marshal. Sara was a master of detail who had spent time working for Mick Jagger as his assistant. She brought in Patrick Woodroffe the Stones’ lighting manager, to design the outdoor and indoor lighting, and two English veterans, Pete Barford and Victoria Swift, to handle the build-out. All stayed with Vanity Fair throughout my time there. Basil Walter, who had worked on our Dakota apartment and our Vanity Fair offices, came in to handle design—as he was to do for every event we did at the magazine from then on.
Another element in our plan was devised by our director of public relations, Beth Kseniak. Space in the parking lot in front of Mortons could accommodate three dozen broadcast television crews—domestic and foreign—on rows of bleacher-like standing areas. We had press photographers roaming the area as well. The result was that it had the intentional kinetic fervor of an old Hollywood premiere—flashing light bulbs, people yelling, lots of high energy. Select members of the press were let inside on a revolving basis. People came out of the party to stand and watch the arrivals and the hoo-ha. By the end of the evening, I realized that we were on the map.
By having no cordoned-off area inside, everybody mixed with everyone else. If you’re a successful movie actor, you don’t really get to meet other movie actors unless you’ve been in a movie with them, because you’re working all the time. So most actors don’t know all that many other people in their industry. I watched as they excitedly navigated the room, meeting fellow actors whose work they admired. They were fascinated by music people, especially. My guess is that it’s because music people don’t just perform, they actually create what they perform. I don’t think an environment like this had been experienced in years—a space where actors could mingle freely with no roped-off area, no bouncers, no minders or personal assistants, and with a mix of other people thrown in. All were free to roam this celebrity Serengeti at will. Over the years, we included a sprinkling of people in the news at the moment, like Monica Lewinsky, General Tommy Franks, or Captain Sully Sullenberger. Already the following year, people were skipping the official Oscar party and coming to ours. We had our foothold in Hollywood.
* * *
That said, we still faced some real problems. For one, I was not the most popular figure out there. I had been at Vanity Fair for only a year and a half. Spy was still a recent memory, and we had treated many of Hollywood’s biggest figures with what New York magazine once called “unfettered, delectable brutality.” It was catnip to anyone who wasn’t actually being attacked at that moment, so everybody read the stories. But for those in the crosshairs, it hurt. One of our more frequent Spy targets was Mike Ovitz, the head of CAA, who had been beside himself with fury at our intrusive coverage. And here I was, now at Vanity Fair, launching the Hollywood party. The single most powerful person in Hollywood would have preferred me dead. It was important that I win him over—or at least try to neutralize him.
We had lunch at his office. He had Eadweard Muybridge photographic prints on the wall that he was very proud of. Ovitz is not without charm and, obviously, is one of the great negotiators, which I am not. But we couldn’t really bury the past. He told me then—something I hadn’t known before—about how he and his partner Ron Meyer worried they might have to close down the agency after Spy ran its secretive client list. He said that it had destroyed so many confidences and broken down so many Chinese walls between the top clients. But Ovitz is a transactional person and wanted to make amends. A truce was put into place, though one where neither party trusted the other.
It was a bit like when S. J. Perelman was writing the screenplay for Around the World in 80 Days and Mike Todd was the producer. Perelman didn’t trust Todd; Todd didn’t trust Perelman. Perelman would come in with pages of script and Todd would have the money and they would exchange them across the table at exactly the same moment. Ovitz went down eventually—years later—in a blaze of name-calling, having lost millions in his own failed agency start-up, plus what remained of his reputation. In a swan-song profile by Bryan Burrough in Vanity Fair in 2002, Ovitz would portray himself as a victim—sabotaged, he said, by David Geffen, the “gay mafia,” his former protégés at CAA, Disney’s Michael Eisner, and The New York Times.
