Tina Brown was just 29 when she joined Vanity Fair as its editor in chief, tasked with transforming the magazine’s lackluster readership. In just eight years, she expanded the magazine's circulation from just 200,000 to 1.2 million — a feat Brown credits to the art of seduction.
“What I was able to do, I thought, with Vanity Fair, was create a package that was a gleaming and glamorous package, but inside of it, we did very good gritty journalism," Brown said when she joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss her latest memoir, The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992. "An editor has to seduce readers into reading everything in the magazine — good, bad, hard, challenging, fun — whatever. You use that glamour packaging to seduce the reader,”
During her years as editor, Brown's front-cover stories included an inside look into the lives of President Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Princess Diana's tumultuous marriage to Prince Charles and the controversial 1991 photograph of a naked, pregnant Demi Moore. Also included in the magazine’s salacious coverage was then-businessman Donald Trump, whose demeanor, according to Brown, was seen by many in the '80s as amusing.
”When I met him first I thought he was a hoot," she said. "Frankly, I mean, he was brash. He was funny. He was loud. And then gradually as the years went by I found him very much less amusing, because we began to kind of cover his finances and realize there was much less there than met the eye."
Notably, an explosive 1990 profile of Donald and Ivana Trump in Vanity Fair mentioned that, from time to time, Trump “read a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order.”
“We were already sensing that there were political ambitions here and I think that, frankly, the Hitler’s speeches were, let’s face it, a clue to who he admired,” said Brown.
Following her editorship at Vanity Fair, Brown spent formative years as the first female editor of The New Yorker and then left that position to create a new media venture called Talk Media — with business partner Harvey Weinstein.
“The thing about Harvey was that it was Jekyll and Hyde," Brown said. "What actually made Harvey interesting was the sort of dissonance between his work, and this appalling monster that he really was. I did see the monster pretty fast after he signed me. Before he signs me it's just fabulous, the great work, the wonderful charm. As soon as you go to work for him you discover that he is a liar, a cheat ... so I was absolutely aghast, as everybody was, by the unbelievable stories.”
While many who knew and worked with Weinstein have been criticized for not doing more to stop his predatory actions, Brown argued that blame is misplaced.
“I really don't believe that anybody ... except his total inner circle, like his brother and so forth, understood quite what the hell was going on with Harvey Weinstein in those hotel suites," Brown said. "One of the things I found ... working with Harvey was his obsession with press, either getting good press or shutting it down. He shut down every bad story that you could possibly hear …. very Trumpian."
You can watch the full interview with Tina Brown by clicking on the video link above. This post has been updated with more details.
