The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown

Author:Tina Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2017-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

1987

SHAKE, RATTLE, AND ROLL

Saturday, January 3, 1987

Return to New York and suddenly feel the stark difference between rich and poor. There’s a growing army of the homeless living on the streets. I see them propped up in doorways, lying half-conscious over gratings when I wheel Georgie down Fifty-Seventh Street in his stroller to the Palace Diner. Whatever the Reagan administration promised was supposed to “trickle down” hasn’t. The hopelessness is such a contrast to the flash and shine of Conde Nast’s world. Some of the new homeless aren’t like others. They are New York’s own version of Bombay’s lepers: hollow eyed, hollowed out, on their way to the next world before they’ve entirely left this one. They are the AIDS sufferers, the ones who can’t afford to hide and go quietly. Everyone in the universe of New York culture has friends who suddenly start to fade, whose paths have been horrifyingly diverted. I seem to always be at funerals. In December a dancer’s death was reported every single day in one week, each with the same melancholy indicators—death at an early age after an unnamed illness, with parents and siblings listed as survivors.

I assigned a piece for the March issue on the toll of AIDS on the arts and fashion. No one has yet gathered up a gallery of faces of all those who have died and denuded us of their talent, and we have done it in a haunting double-page spread. I asked our new hire Michael Shnayerson, who was the editor of Avenue, to report it out. He’s a young straight guy who lives in the West Village and who until this assignment was oblivious to AIDS. Now, reporting the piece, he says it’s been like stepping into a war zone. He has done a slew of interviews with artists and arts leaders like Joe Papp who see the toll growing every day, and the doctors who recount stories from the front. Papp’s tears rolled down his cheeks unabated as he talked to Michael about the loss. The most moving interview in the piece is with the makeup artist Way Bandy’s lover, Maury Hopson, describing Way’s last days. How dignified he was, how brave. “I mean, here was this person who was a makeup artist you might think would be some big sissy,” Maury said. “And he went out like a fucking lion.” It made me cry.

The piece has given me a chance in the editor’s letter to write about the death of Henry Post at Tatler. My shock when I visited him in New York-Presbyterian in the summer of 1982, his blond hair shaved off, his restless eyes raking the ward as if for explanation. “Your fashionable correspondent is dying of the fashionable disease,” he said. Flippant to the last.

Collecting the pictures of the people who have died has been a real challenge. So many were in the closet or didn’t want anyone to know they died from AIDS, or had hidden it from their families. Is

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