All That Glitters: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, and the Rivalry Inside America's Richest Media Empire by Thomas Maier

Author:Thomas Maier [Maier, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Rich & Famous, Business & Economics, Industries, Media & Communications, History, United States, 20th Century, Modern, Social History, Women
ISBN: 9781510744929
Google: B8aeDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2019-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

Si Newhouse’s dream of restoring Vanity Fair was now complete, an unparalleled feat in publishing, of transforming a dead “book” from the 1920s into the liveliest read of the 1990s. He was convinced that Vanity Fair had a great future under Brown and, after much initial consternation, might soon repay his investment.

“The only thing Vanity Fair gave me more confidence in was Tina Brown,” Newhouse admitted.

With her wit and style, with her producer-like flair for the dramatic, Tina Brown turned the once-bad reviews about Vanity Fair into a rave. It was the best show in town, often read cover to cover, as Brown liked to say, by the likes of Henry Kissinger as well as Warren Beatty.

When Vanity Fair was nominated seven times for the prestigious National Magazine Award in 1992, including Bennetts’s piece on pedophilia, Brown celebrated with a staff party.

“It goes to show,” she said, as confident as any editor in her prime, “when our peers are forced to sit down and actually read the magazine, they have to acknowledge the caliber of what appears in it.”

Everyone in the room roared with approval.

Brown’s new, more serious approach was perhaps best underlined by another investigative piece by Bennetts. Her exposé showed how Nancy Reagan, once a great benefactor of Phoenix House, the renowned drug treatment foundation, had tried to make sure its new treatment facility in California would never open.

After years of preaching “Just say no”—her well-known public service message against drug abuse during her time in the White House—Mrs. Reagan caved in to pressure from her rich neighbors who worried that Phoenix House might attract all sorts of undesirables.

Bennetts’s story caught the former first lady in a rank hypocrisy of the worst sort. When Tina Brown heard of the angle for the story, she seized upon it. As Bennetts recalled, “I had ten days to do the Phoenix House piece, including going to California when I was breast-feeding.”

This critical treatment of Nancy Reagan was a remarkable change for a magazine that, when the Reagans were in power, pictured them not only kissing in one 1985 issue, but also featured them again in 1989 waving good-bye with the headline “Happy Trails”—as if the two-term presidency had been just some two-reeler on a Saturday matinee.

For that gala farewell edition, Vanity Fair gave the Reagans approval rights over their photos. It wasn’t the first time, either. In a solicitous May 1986 letter to Nancy Reagan, asking for her help with another Vanity Fair feature about longtime devoted couples, Brown signed away any semblance of editorial independence: “I want to assure you that the feature will definitely consist of a portfolio of couples and that I would like to offer you an early opportunity to approve the photos and text.”

With the Reagans out of power, though, Tina’s tone chilled considerably.

After the Bennetts piece appeared, the ensuing controversy deeply embarrassed the former first lady and, as if to save the day, emboldened Brown to embrace Phoenix House as her own cause. In March

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