Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from My Heart Radio. Summer is here, and that
Speaker 1: means along with pool parties and barbecues, it's time for
Speaker 1: our staff summer Picks. Every other week, a member of
Speaker 1: the Here's the Thing staff will choose their favorite episodes
Speaker 1: from our archives and host the show themselves. First up
Speaker 1: is our producer Kathleen Russo. Kathleen has been with me
Speaker 1: from the very beginning of this podcast. She's chosen to
Speaker 1: share with you two groundbreaking women in entertainment, documentary producer
Speaker 1: Sheila Nevins and journalist, author, and editor Tina Brown, two
Speaker 1: extraordinary women in media, brought to you by another that's Kathie.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for our other staff picks throughout the summer,
Speaker 1: and now the legendary Kathleen Russo. Thanks, Alec. I chose
Speaker 1: Sheila and Tina's interviews, both recorded in two thousand seven team,
Speaker 1: because they are two women I deeply respect and admire.
Speaker 1: They are the uber media mavens. I met Sheila in
Speaker 1: two thousand five at HBO's headquarters in New York City.
Speaker 1: My husband, the monologist Spalding Gray, died the year before
Speaker 1: and Sheila contacted me because she was a fan of
Speaker 1: his work. She really wanted to produce a documentary on
Speaker 1: his life. We got Steven Soderberg to direct, but sadly
Speaker 1: it never came to fruition with HBO. We took it elsewhere.
Speaker 1: But the meetings we had with Sheila were so lively
Speaker 1: and fun in her Leopard motif apartment. It was a
Speaker 1: great distraction for me at the time. Let's listen to
Speaker 1: Alex conversation with Sheila where she's talking about her childhood.
Speaker 1: If you've been moved by a documentary in the past
Speaker 1: forty years, there's a chance you have Sheila Nevins to thank.
Speaker 1: As head of HBO documentary Films since nine she's exerted
Speaker 1: more influence on the medium than perhaps anyone in its history,
Speaker 1: so much so that The New York Times says filmmakers
Speaker 1: quote fret about her outsized power, but also worry about
Speaker 1: what will happen when she's gone. Sheila Nevins has overseen
Speaker 1: the production of literally hundreds of documentaries which have won
Speaker 1: dozens of Oscars, and she's credited or blamed for being
Speaker 1: one of the creators of reality television through nineties hits
Speaker 1: like real sex and taxi cab confessions, whether they're shot
Speaker 1: in a war zone or the back of a taxi.
Speaker 1: Sheila nevins productions are powerful, brazen, and unflinchingly honest, but
Speaker 1: when it comes to telling her own story, truth gets trickier.
Speaker 1: Her new book, You Don't Look Your Age and Other
Speaker 1: Fairy Tales, blends fiction and reality. It's not a bio,
Speaker 1: as someone said to me, It's a sly memoir. Who
Speaker 1: counseled you want how to write the book? Who? Nobody? Nobody? Nobody?
Speaker 1: You knew instinctively to do this this way. I have
Speaker 1: no idea what right. I knew when too high, and
Speaker 1: I knew when to over here, and I knew the
Speaker 1: names of the characters without ever some of them are Sheila,
Speaker 1: and some of them are Priscilla or Melissa. And I
Speaker 1: was going to do that in my book, and I didn't.
Speaker 1: Maybe nicer than me more honest. I just felt that
Speaker 1: when I gave the character name, I protected a lot
Speaker 1: of people, or when I overheard it, I wasn't in it,
Speaker 1: and then I could write more freely about the truth
Speaker 1: of it. I don't know that I could have written
Speaker 1: certain things if it had been me. In her book,
Speaker 1: Nevin's uses a few characters to paint a portrait of
Speaker 1: the male dominated world she navigated. Only one of those
Speaker 1: characters is named Sheila Nevans, but they're all strong, smart
Speaker 1: women who fight and sleep their way to the top.
Speaker 1: In a way, the sexual politics of the sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies is a side show. Sheila nevins true passion is
Speaker 1: to immerse herself in the lives of her subjects. And
Speaker 1: like many passions, this one makes you suffer. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think if you're a surgeon, the person is ancestized
Speaker 1: when you're cutting out their heart, But when you're making
Speaker 1: a documentary, the person is alive and kicking and they
Speaker 1: stay with you. Um, you know, I can't explain it.
Speaker 1: When you go to sleep at night, they they interrupt
Speaker 1: counting sheep. You know, you see, you see sadness all
Speaker 1: the time. There's a lot of suffering in this world.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of people who have no way out.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have a way out, We have a
Speaker 1: way out, we have more options, and without empathy, there's
Speaker 1: no humanity. And I think docus are the last resort
Speaker 1: for effective if that's the right use of the word
Speaker 1: feeling for someone you didn't know. That's a great thing
Speaker 1: about a document You turn it on, it's in your
Speaker 1: living room. Okay, you didn't invite it. You thought I'll
Speaker 1: try it, and then suddenly you're crying for someone you
Speaker 1: never knew before, and they're not It's not an actor
Speaker 1: playing apart. It's not something that was scripted. It's another
Speaker 1: human being trying to live in this country or another country,
Speaker 1: and it stays with you. It's very difficult. I mean
Speaker 1: you really, you really agonize. I agonize. I'm not happy.
Speaker 1: Just walk into that closet full of Emmys and oscars.
Speaker 1: You have them. Maybe that make you happy that you
Speaker 1: fall on your foot and down their doorstoppers. For most couple,
Speaker 1: I don't have them. But pick one if you can,
Speaker 1: and tell us a bit about one that really really
Speaker 1: just crushed you. What was the one that was an
Speaker 1: extraordinarily difficult experience for you to bring that film to
Speaker 1: the public. Maybe the one about Tourette's even though it
Speaker 1: was by far not the best documentary on HBO. But
Speaker 1: because I had been there twenty five years before, I
Speaker 1: was willing to come out as a parent of a
Speaker 1: child who had Tourette's and your son, my son David. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I think that with his permission, I was
Speaker 1: able to write about it my book. But mainly I
Speaker 1: was able to make a film for schools so that
Speaker 1: kids that had turets would not be bullied because it was, um,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're a fat you were bullied, If
Speaker 1: you studied, you were bullied. But if you had Tourette's,
Speaker 1: nobody knew what you had. They thought you were dopey.
Speaker 1: They push you, they'd imitate you. This one was tough
Speaker 1: because I had to go to my bosses and say,
Speaker 1: I want to make this film about Tourette's doesn't affect everybody.
Speaker 1: I want to do it from my kid and this
Speaker 1: is a big place called HBO, And they said, do it.
Speaker 1: You've earned it, And I did it. Now for people
Speaker 1: who don't understand Tourette's beyond you know, the outbursts, the
Speaker 1: vocal outbursts and so forth, when did you when do
Speaker 1: you first become aware of a child having that? At
Speaker 1: what ages it exhibit itself? Well, the vocal outbursts are
Speaker 1: less than five percent. So the fact that that's called
Speaker 1: copper alien and um, that means that you yell four
Speaker 1: letter words. Can I say them on this show? I
Speaker 1: think our answers, well, if you're here, they know, Okay.
Speaker 1: So the kid who yelled funck ship this, fuck your fuck,
Speaker 1: you ask your motherfuck. That is less than five percent,
Speaker 1: but the media has it's the most. It first of all,
Speaker 1: gave the media chance to use the words and bleep
Speaker 1: them and make it exciting. And certainly it was unfair
Speaker 1: to the kids to amy, but people like Robin Williams.
Speaker 1: There's also a very interesting part of Tourette's which is
Speaker 1: called Ekilalia had that yes, where imitative behavior is part
Speaker 1: of the affliction. So in other words, you go to
Speaker 1: a movie, you come back. The kid does the whole
Speaker 1: almost the whole movie, and does the actual sounds of
Speaker 1: the voices of the different people. But the film is difficult,
Speaker 1: fe painful. It was very painful because, for one, I
Speaker 1: had to tell David we were going to do it too. Um.
Speaker 1: He had to be willing to come out as a
Speaker 1: kid who had tourette. We both agreed that it was
Speaker 1: a necessary film. It wasn't great, but it was useful.
Speaker 1: You know that there are different kinds of docums. What
Speaker 1: about a filmmaker meaning you have people coming in. They all,
Speaker 1: you know, many of them want something from you. They
Speaker 1: want you to help. But I cast I cast the
Speaker 1: films the way you would cast a movie, you know,
Speaker 1: and I try to find filmmakers who have a passion
Speaker 1: for a subject, and then I try to put them
Speaker 1: together with that subject. So if it's me and maximum
Speaker 1: culpa about abuses, let's say in the Catholic church, I'll
Speaker 1: find someone who is a renegade Catholic to be able
Speaker 1: to go after it both with the passion of being
Speaker 1: a kid who's brought up that way and at the
Speaker 1: same time someone who's able to look at it with
Speaker 1: with the right amount of subjective involvement. And in that
Speaker 1: case it turned out to be Alex Gibney. But it's
Speaker 1: very different. I mean, Alexander Pelosi is doing a film
Speaker 1: for us. Now on everybody says, let's do an anti
Speaker 1: Trump film. Okay, I must get five pictures a day
Speaker 1: about let's do this, Let's do who voted, Let's do
Speaker 1: the Democrats who voted, Let's do the women the college graduated.
Speaker 1: Every day, there's something. And so it occurred to us
Speaker 1: that maybe what we should do is go back to
Speaker 1: the Founding Fathers, maybe we should go back to the
Speaker 1: dream of what democracy was. And so this film is
Speaker 1: about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence in the Bill
Speaker 1: of Rights. And I watched it last night, pretty late,
Speaker 1: and I found myself getting weepy over the dream, you know,
Speaker 1: not laughing at it, but weepy over the original beauty
Speaker 1: of it, the beauty of it, the beauty of being
Speaker 1: free from the king. And in the descriptions of breaking
Speaker 1: away from the king, it was as if it was
Speaker 1: on you know, CNN that night, the king had just
Speaker 1: transmigrated into somebody else, and it was terrifying and also
Speaker 1: illuminating about the prophetic vision of the Founding Fathers. It's
Speaker 1: really extraordinarily interesting and at the same time, you know, complex,
Speaker 1: but you know, this whole country was founded on getting
Speaker 1: away from from a dictatorship. Let me ask you this,
Speaker 1: which is maybe some kind of a stereo track you
Speaker 1: can um you can try to paint a picture from
Speaker 1: me what the what the company was like when you started,
Speaker 1: because when I I always joke with people that HBO.
Speaker 1: When I was first living in New York in the
Speaker 1: early eighties, HBO would come on and they had that
Speaker 1: theme song that sounds like an Israeli FA play the
Speaker 1: same like MTV and they played Billy Idol and Flock
Speaker 1: of Seagulls all day long. And so in that time,
Speaker 1: how has it changed and how was it changed for
Speaker 1: you as a woman in the business since in your time.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how much has changed, I really argue,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I don't really think so. I
Speaker 1: think I was an anomaly. So I was not a
Speaker 1: threat because who else was going to work twenty hours
Speaker 1: a day, have a sick kid, take all the jokes,
Speaker 1: do the whole thing. I've had nine bosses in thirty
Speaker 1: five years. It's pretty hard because each one was a
Speaker 1: magic slate, so anything you've done before was unknown or
Speaker 1: not necessarily valid to them because they had to re
Speaker 1: establish themselves. So it was listen, I'm not complaining. I've
Speaker 1: had the greatest job in the world, but I was
Speaker 1: an anomaly. Who what woman wanted to work twenty hours
Speaker 1: a day? Who wanted to do docues? Anyway? It was
Speaker 1: an eight hour services So it was tough for you
Speaker 1: as a woman. What was hard not getting pinched. That's
Speaker 1: the great advantage to getting older. You're there from the
Speaker 1: next hanky panky. So it's nick up now, but I
Speaker 1: don't do with that in the early days. Maybe, okay,
Speaker 1: I want to keep my job, okay, but not even yes.
Speaker 1: Of course I had to do deal with that. Of
Speaker 1: course I did, and I dealt with it readily and
Speaker 1: aggressively and happily because I didn't know any better. And
Speaker 1: I I mean, I've discussed this with Gloria Steinham. It
Speaker 1: was the only thing I knew. I wanted that job badly.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make something of it. And if it required,
Speaker 1: you know, a hand on a knee or whatever else,
Speaker 1: you overlooked. I looked, but then I turned away. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say I overlooked. I felt it deep down, but
Speaker 1: I you weren't compromised in some find some extreme way.
Speaker 1: People just took it was the rules of the game.
Speaker 1: I thought it was the rules of the game. Why
Speaker 1: would I know it was like shooting a gun. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't like it, but I need to learn how
Speaker 1: I knew that was the way I did what I
Speaker 1: had to do. You didn't want me to not get
Speaker 1: this job, did you. I'm glad that you were as
Speaker 1: open minded as you were to do better. Documentary happily, slutty,
Speaker 1: happily so because I didn't know anything else. The job
Speaker 1: was worth more than my sexual identity. There were no
Speaker 1: human resources to protect me. There was nothing, and I
Speaker 1: was pretty You had no exactly, you had no protector, no,
Speaker 1: no protector, And I wanted to do it and I
Speaker 1: didn't want them to give it away. Yeah. I just
Speaker 1: had just gotten married. Yeah at the time, would you
Speaker 1: go home and like, did your husband know that you
Speaker 1: were enduring all this groping? But no, because I could
Speaker 1: brush it off. You know, I've done a lot of
Speaker 1: shows with hookers, and I've done a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: at cat House in Las Vegas. Were the men being
Speaker 1: taken advantage of over the women? Have you ever seen
Speaker 1: our Cathouse show? They bought a hundred books the cathouse,
Speaker 1: you see, I don't have anyone else probably giving it
Speaker 1: out now, the book. When you make films and you
Speaker 1: get involved, you're giving notes, you're telling them. I'm watching
Speaker 1: the clip of you from Alexander's Thing where you're saying
Speaker 1: I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored. And what you were
Speaker 1: looking for in a film, what you're expecting of a
Speaker 1: filmmaker of a film. Did you expect the same of
Speaker 1: yourself when you wrote this book? You did? Okay? Talk
Speaker 1: about that? Why? Because, in a strange way, I wrote
Speaker 1: the book in a very selfish way, and when I'm
Speaker 1: in an editing room, I don't think I'm particularly selfish.
Speaker 1: I wrote it because I didn't want to be the
Speaker 1: legend of documentaries. I didn't want to be a docut diva.
Speaker 1: What did you want to be? I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a person like everybody? Are you in this book? I
Speaker 1: think so? Would you say that there's some writing here
Speaker 1: that's the equivalent of the plastic surgery of writing without questions?
Speaker 1: There's a lot of plastic surgery in this lot. There's enough.
Speaker 1: I mean, you said I looked good, so it must
Speaker 1: be enough. And if the book sells, good for you.
Speaker 1: If if the book doesn't real as well as you look.
Speaker 1: So the plastic surgery in the writing is part of it,
Speaker 1: That's only part of it. Why does everybody pick up
Speaker 1: the plastic surgery? I remember the lawyer from um McMillan
Speaker 1: asking me if there was someone named Melissa. Melissa van
Speaker 1: Holden boss sleeps with her boss. It's the sixties and
Speaker 1: she can't get ahead any other way? And um he called,
Speaker 1: and he said, do you know anyone named Melissa? And
Speaker 1: Mr Penny Broth is the name of the boss? Now?
Speaker 1: Who is named Mr Penny Broth? Let's be real, he said,
Speaker 1: is but it just came. The name came, Um, Mr
Speaker 1: Penny Broth, you know, fuck Melissa, and Melissa got a
Speaker 1: promotion and it was three. It wasn't her fault and
Speaker 1: that's the way that was. Were the rules of the game? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean they drove me crazy. Is there anyone named Melissa?
Speaker 1: At HBO? I said, I'm sure there are a number
Speaker 1: of women named Melissa here? Is there? Mr Pennybroth? Have
Speaker 1: you ever worked for Mr Penny Broth? I said, nobody
Speaker 1: would have the name Mr Pennybroth. They said, you never know?
Speaker 1: So then I looked in the you know, I typed
Speaker 1: it into my iPad. I couldn't find a Penny Broth similar.
Speaker 1: But I don't know where those names from. So is
Speaker 1: it really am I hiding? If there's nobody by that name,
Speaker 1: then who is it? There must be me? Right, I
Speaker 1: don't know the answer, but I mean I don't still
Speaker 1: don't know. It might not be the bravest riding in
Speaker 1: the world. But it's very interesting. I never would say
Speaker 1: I was grave. I'm honest. It's about adultery. It's also
Speaker 1: about I don't care about rolling in and out of love.
Speaker 1: It's also about anti Semitism. It's also about your heart
Speaker 1: being broken. Can we pick let's stop there. Can we
Speaker 1: pick one topic? That are you talking about? Adultery? Who's adultery?
Speaker 1: Certainly not my own? Okay, not your own? How do
Speaker 1: I know those eyes of yours? We've got those wonderful
Speaker 1: eyes and they're in the morning. They don't look I
Speaker 1: don't want to know what they're looking at the more,
Speaker 1: that's not my business? Is that my business? You've been
Speaker 1: happily married to Sydney all these years, of course, And
Speaker 1: did you ever describe what it's like for you to
Speaker 1: fall in love? Because you're pretty tough broad, You're pretty
Speaker 1: no nons sense woman, you're tough. We would it like
Speaker 1: to pall in love? Love redefines itself as you get older,
Speaker 1: when you fell in love with him? What did you
Speaker 1: fall in love with? Sydney? Or my heartbreak? In my
Speaker 1: book both take sax to Sydney first. No, my heartbreak first,
Speaker 1: My heartbreak? This is my show. It's my show now.
Speaker 1: I mean, where would you be without me sitting here?
Speaker 1: You'll be talking to yourself. Heartbreak happens once, I believe
Speaker 1: real heartbreak. What happened? You don't repair describe the situation.
Speaker 1: We'll do what you do in your book. The woman
Speaker 1: in the third person meets who. Sometimes I'm myself, sometimes
Speaker 1: I'm not. I'm really quite crazy though. It's a young
Speaker 1: girl who goes to the eld drama school. She falls
Speaker 1: in love with a guy. She goes home to his
Speaker 1: very fancy house in Connecticut with initials on the thing
Speaker 1: and Gilbert Stewart pictures and all that. He goes to Harvard.
Speaker 1: They meet at a law school moot court thing, and um,
Speaker 1: the mother says to her, aren't there any interesting Jewish
Speaker 1: men in the law school? And you never see him again?
Speaker 1: That's heartbreak, that's heartbreak. You liked him, care about him,
Speaker 1: I loved him? How long were you with him? Semester
Speaker 1: a year of you know, sort of make believe in
Speaker 1: thinking that life made sense. Semesters a big chapter of
Speaker 1: your life when you're young, big chapter of your life,
Speaker 1: especially when you've never really been in love before. You
Speaker 1: don't get over that. You don't get over that hurt.
Speaker 1: It takes a long, long, long What did you fall
Speaker 1: in love with? About Sydney? Comfort? Kindness and good partner
Speaker 1: good partner friendship intelligence. But I'm not sure he could
Speaker 1: have ever broken my heart. I think you break your
Speaker 1: heart one time, do you. I think if you're someone
Speaker 1: who becomes other people, then you become capable of other
Speaker 1: stes of a rocket and saying, I'm pretty the same,
Speaker 1: much the same, So you mean you change. I'm the
Speaker 1: same person I was fifty years ago. I'm just old,
Speaker 1: coming up. Sheila Nevans talks about being raised by a communist.
Speaker 1: Sheila Nevins has nurtured many documentary filmmakers. Joe Burlinger, creator
Speaker 1: of HBO's Paradise Lost, is one of them. His films
Speaker 1: tell a shocking story of justice denied three boys in
Speaker 1: the Bible Belt wrongfully convicted of ritual sexual abuse and murder.
Speaker 1: Burlinger said the story haunted him. You know, my first
Speaker 1: kid was born while we were editing this film, and
Speaker 1: I would be sitting, you know, at the editing bay,
Speaker 1: looking at the most horrific autopsy photos and crime scene footage.
Speaker 1: You know, I would go home at night after having
Speaker 1: these images like emblazoned on your brain, and I would
Speaker 1: drop the you know, the door of the crib and
Speaker 1: pick up my new infant who has just arrived a
Speaker 1: few months ago. And every hallmark that my child would
Speaker 1: go through, you know, kindergart in middle school, high school,
Speaker 1: I think, my god, these guys are still rotting in prison.
Speaker 1: I just felt we had a you know, we had
Speaker 1: a moral obligation to keep telling the story. Listened to
Speaker 1: the full conversation and here's the thing, Dot Org. I'm
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Sheila and Evans. Nearly four decades stewardship of HBO documentaries
Speaker 1: has helped usher in a golden age for the form.
Speaker 1: But when she started, the very word documentary could doom
Speaker 1: a project to obscurity. I think that docums have become hot.
Speaker 1: When I began in this business, we didn't even want
Speaker 1: to use the word documentary. When we did promos for films,
Speaker 1: we would call them docutainment. We invented this lutic word
Speaker 1: because we're afraid that if we said documentary, people would
Speaker 1: feel that it was for the lead and that it
Speaker 1: was about politics, and that it was not going to
Speaker 1: be about human stories, and so we we hid behind
Speaker 1: this word docuertainment. And then slowly but surely it took
Speaker 1: a good years, we began to say, well, maybe it's
Speaker 1: not such a dirty word, and reality programming sort of said,
Speaker 1: real people can be interesting in a trivial way. Now,
Speaker 1: how do we take that real people think and bring
Speaker 1: it back to real stories that have heart and soul.
Speaker 1: So then somehow it went docutainment, reality TV. Yea documentary,
Speaker 1: go for it, say that real people, people without celebrity,
Speaker 1: people who are trying to survive in a complicated world,
Speaker 1: and say it in their own words and not either
Speaker 1: have to have scripted or apologize for it, but let
Speaker 1: it go for itself. So if a woman would be
Speaker 1: living on a minimum wage, for instance, um, we would
Speaker 1: almost cast that woman to be someone who could tell
Speaker 1: that story. I got three kids, I'm working in a
Speaker 1: nursing home. I'm making seven dollars an hour. I gotta
Speaker 1: have three jobs. My husband is on drugs, he's left me.
Speaker 1: We we felt we could tell those stories with real people.
Speaker 1: We didn't have to use narrative. I'll due respect, but
Speaker 1: we could we could elevate the common man's story and
Speaker 1: use the word documentary, and I think they became somewhat
Speaker 1: precious and difficult um and and had parody at festivals.
Speaker 1: Began to have parody at festivals with narrative. So suddenly
Speaker 1: Toronto would have a whole section on documentary. Sundance was
Speaker 1: actually the first. But Docus at that time were hot docs.
Speaker 1: They had their own festivals. They were not part of
Speaker 1: festivals that had actors and famous people, and you know,
Speaker 1: they were sort of an offshoot. I think now docums
Speaker 1: have gotten parody. But is it safe to say, I'd
Speaker 1: love to hear your viewpoint about this that, and not
Speaker 1: that it's a seller's market now, But is it tougher
Speaker 1: for you to find what you want? It's so petitive, horrifying.
Speaker 1: Your job is harder than it was. Job is much
Speaker 1: harder because first of all, a lot of people have
Speaker 1: monopoly money and I'm still playing with real cash. So
Speaker 1: I really can't play the well. Netflix has tons of
Speaker 1: dollars and they don't. No, not for docues. No. Why
Speaker 1: why is that the company is the company's mission or
Speaker 1: what happened? I can't speak for the company. A peon.
Speaker 1: I would say that it's not a high priority stars
Speaker 1: rule and series still feel themselves as almost like a studio.
Speaker 1: I think so. I think the development of a series
Speaker 1: is where the money's at. It's where the sales are
Speaker 1: at one shot, they're chasing that. That's where they're there.
Speaker 1: They're not there. If you took docues off HBO, I
Speaker 1: think they have a million places to go. Ten years ago,
Speaker 1: if you took docues off HBO, you wouldn't have a
Speaker 1: place to find them. So it's tough. It's really tough.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about your childhood and how you grew up.
Speaker 1: Movie or No. I was allowed to watch television. No, no, no.
Speaker 1: My mother was a Communist. She had gone to school
Speaker 1: with Ethel Rosenberg. And so when Ethel Rosenberg was assassinated
Speaker 1: or whatever the word is, in the electric chair, I
Speaker 1: thought any minute they were coming to take my mother.
Speaker 1: My best friend was Billy and his father was the
Speaker 1: editor of the Daily Worker. And I came home one day,
Speaker 1: Second Avenue in sixth Street. My father was a postman
Speaker 1: on the lower side. Yeah, I'm a poor girl. See
Speaker 1: that's why I wrote the book. Because everybody thought I
Speaker 1: went to Barnard. I went to Yale. I went to
Speaker 1: performing Arts. Ritzi Titsy Titsy TITSI Doorman. You clawed your
Speaker 1: way to the top the Jewish Eve Harrington. Wow, No,
Speaker 1: I was very good. I didn't call my way. I
Speaker 1: was fucking good. And I'm still. I'm really smart, and
Speaker 1: I'm smart about what people might watch, and I'm smart
Speaker 1: about self criticism, and I'm happy to be wrong as
Speaker 1: long as I'm right. So how did you end up
Speaker 1: in this business? What did your father do for a living?
Speaker 1: My father a postman in a bookie. Why did you
Speaker 1: end up in this business because you went to drama school? No,
Speaker 1: but I made you directing it. Yeah, because I knew
Speaker 1: I was not a good actress. I thought that I
Speaker 1: would and I was a terrible to answer. I thought
Speaker 1: that I would have been good at storytelling and knowing
Speaker 1: when it was wrong and when it was right. I
Speaker 1: had a great teacher at Yale who we also had
Speaker 1: to take acting classes, and she said to me, you
Speaker 1: had the perfect director because you're always watching. And I thought,
Speaker 1: that's true. I'm always I'm always looking in, I'm always watching.
Speaker 1: Taxicab Confessions, which we did, was an example of a
Speaker 1: show that came from observations like I found that when
Speaker 1: I was in a taxi, I knew I never see
Speaker 1: that person again. I could tell them things I wouldn't
Speaker 1: tell anybody else. I thought, if I'm doing this, other
Speaker 1: people can be doing this. Why don't we do taxicab
Speaker 1: confessions and take the car out at five and go
Speaker 1: through the night. And then we did it. And they
Speaker 1: were great stories, great secret stories that people tell and
Speaker 1: we would ask them to sign a release, and very
Speaker 1: often they didn't. Some of the best stories are hidden
Speaker 1: in the lock and key. Now here's the last thing
Speaker 1: I want to say to you. You went to Barnard
Speaker 1: and you went to Yale, and you've had this great
Speaker 1: career and you've won all the awards and your name
Speaker 1: is synonymous with the highest level of documentary filmmaking them
Speaker 1: the last you deliver my memorial service. If I'm available,
Speaker 1: you have to get paid. Now. I appreciate your career. No,
Speaker 1: that's why you're here. Okay, But but last, but at least,
Speaker 1: there's something about you. There's this woman thing about you.
Speaker 1: You go when you make this effort in the the
Speaker 1: beautification and the kind of corrections and all this other stuff,
Speaker 1: and you look phenomenal, by the way, but I just
Speaker 1: want to say, there's a thing about you. You know,
Speaker 1: you bathe in this world of the stark and the wheel,
Speaker 1: but there's a part of me that I think you
Speaker 1: want to be in love again. I see you in
Speaker 1: a bathrobe on a terrace in Paris and you're just
Speaker 1: having the longest kiss in the world. Is that what
Speaker 1: you want? Is you do want to fall already that
Speaker 1: I don't really want to be in a bathrobe on
Speaker 1: a terrorist and it took good to get out my psychiaty.
Speaker 1: You don't know you don't want to be in love
Speaker 1: again and have a passion. No romance, No, you don't.
Speaker 1: I want to make the best documentary in the world.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's it, that's it, that's all I want.
Speaker 1: I just offered you romance bath you'd rather I want
Speaker 1: to make a document wins a prize. We're going to
Speaker 1: stop right there, because that's why you're the greatest. I
Speaker 1: don't want that going to make I want Alexandre's docu
Speaker 1: to win awards. I wanted to make people know about
Speaker 1: the beginning of the founding fathers and the dream of
Speaker 1: the country. That's what I want to do. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not square and stupid and idealistic more than anything,
Speaker 1: More than anything, What do I want? What do you want? Us?
Speaker 1: To make great movies? Yeah? I think that's true. It
Speaker 1: makes me almost want to cry when you say that.
Speaker 1: Now let's turn to Alex conversation with Tina Brown. After
Speaker 1: Tina came in for the Standard You, I approached her
Speaker 1: about doing her own podcast. She loved the idea, and
Speaker 1: one thing led to another. Our first meeting was at
Speaker 1: her infamous town house in New York City, and I
Speaker 1: was let in and waited for Tina in the dining room.
Speaker 1: In the distance, I could see her husband, Sir Harold Evans,
Speaker 1: working in his office, and then I began to look
Speaker 1: at all the photographs in the wall of Tina with
Speaker 1: people I had only read about. We got a deal
Speaker 1: with Wondering to produce a podcast for the year and
Speaker 1: called it TB D with Tina Brown. I learned so
Speaker 1: much from working with Tina. She was tough, but she
Speaker 1: was by far the best editor I've ever worked with,
Speaker 1: not to mention her interviewing skills. We only worked on
Speaker 1: TBD for a year, but it was truly an honor
Speaker 1: to produce a podcast with this trailblazer. Crime and unemployment
Speaker 1: were still high, but it was morning in corporate America.
Speaker 1: The Dow was up by a third in six months,
Speaker 1: and the og eighties had begun. Among the many who
Speaker 1: landed in New York to make their fortune that year
Speaker 1: was a hot shot magazine editor from London who would
Speaker 1: chronicle and then shape that decade like no other. Tina
Speaker 1: Brown was twenty nine years old. Her story became inseparable
Speaker 1: from that of her creation, a relaunched nineteen twenties glossy
Speaker 1: that came to define the Reagan era Vanity Fair. Brown
Speaker 1: was a decisive boss, an instinctive editor, and a pioneer
Speaker 1: of layout. But that's only a part of what secured
Speaker 1: her place on top of New York society. She brought
Speaker 1: to her dinner parties and outsider's power of social observation
Speaker 1: and a wit so sharp you didn't know you were
Speaker 1: bleeding until you were halfway home. But Tina Brown can
Speaker 1: tell her own story. She did, in fact, in real time.
Speaker 1: Her new book, Vanity Fair Diaries, as a series of
Speaker 1: diary entries, starting the day she first landed in New
Speaker 1: York for Vanity Fair. Wednesday made the first Thursday, January tenth,
Speaker 1: Monday Wednesday of Sunday, April tenth three. I am here
Speaker 1: in NYC at last, brimming with fear and insecurity, getting
Speaker 1: in late last night on British airways, I suddenly felt
Speaker 1: the enormousness of New York City. And she made it
Speaker 1: to the big leagues because four years earlier, barely out
Speaker 1: of Oxford, Tina Brown landed the editorship of a languishing
Speaker 1: old magazine called Tatler after everyone else turned down the job.
Speaker 1: And I turned it into this very buzzy little glossy
Speaker 1: and signed new House, who was then the chairman of
Speaker 1: connyn Ass. Then after two years and me editing it
Speaker 1: three years, he came in and he bought it for Connynas.
Speaker 1: So that's how I joined conn asked, was that I
Speaker 1: was really brought into the family of Connynas with Tatler
Speaker 1: and you over there off when I was in London,
Speaker 1: And how long did you do that under his ownership? Well?
Speaker 1: I left actually after about a year because the Tatler
Speaker 1: had been the kind of scrappy little startup, and when
Speaker 1: Connynas bought it, I missed the insurgent nature of the public.
Speaker 1: You know. I I loved having my little team of insurgents,
Speaker 1: these young turks that I had out of college. And
Speaker 1: then when Connie Nas brought it, I felt it had
Speaker 1: become a sort of stately thing, and I just, you know,
Speaker 1: I love being in the kind of the rebel band,
Speaker 1: you know, so I left. Actually, people don't normally put
Speaker 1: you in the rebel band. Well, I know, some pretty
Speaker 1: ivory towers, right, but rebel band is where I began,
Speaker 1: and I love that. And I had a very brilliant
Speaker 1: young group who all went on to do great things
Speaker 1: of Connas. So I left. And then as I left,
Speaker 1: I kept hearing that Connin Asked had launched this new
Speaker 1: magazine in America, Vanity Fair, that this was they were
Speaker 1: bringing back this icon, this old magazine of the twenties
Speaker 1: and thirties that hadn't had all these amazing you know,
Speaker 1: people like Claire booth Loosen and Dorothy Parker and so
Speaker 1: on writing for it. And I was very attracted to
Speaker 1: that because I'm a sort of magazine romantic. So I
Speaker 1: never thought I would get to edit it, but I
Speaker 1: you know, we heard it like the music in the
Speaker 1: other room. Then Conyan has launched Fanity Fair in eight three,
Speaker 1: and it was a complete debarkle, you know, the first
Speaker 1: two arts. But it was one of those things where
Speaker 1: the sort of the pre hype sort of almost killed
Speaker 1: the magazine. It was a complete dissonance between the magazine
Speaker 1: they were advertising and hyping and the magazine they put out.
Speaker 1: They what was the chasm between the two. The chasm
Speaker 1: between the two was that they said, great magazine comes
Speaker 1: back from the dead, legendary magazine. You'll never see anything
Speaker 1: more exciting, more glamorous, more important than this magazine. And
Speaker 1: then they had a very bookish, very you know, a nerdy,
Speaker 1: smart guy from the New York Times who'd never been
Speaker 1: a magazine editor. His name was Richard Locke, and you know,
Speaker 1: on paper he was a good hire. He was a
Speaker 1: brainy guy, but he never done a magazine. And magazines
Speaker 1: it's it's all about the chemistry of the words and
Speaker 1: the pictures and the headlines and the you know, and
Speaker 1: the captions and all the things that make a magazine dance.
Speaker 1: He didn't know how to do that. So it was
Speaker 1: a very boring magazine. It after him, and then they
Speaker 1: had they fired him and brought on Leo Lerman, who
Speaker 1: was the former editor of features editor Vogue He was
Speaker 1: a kind of seventy five year old, you know, culture
Speaker 1: maven old, kind of gossipy old guy who you know
Speaker 1: who was the sort of the darling of the ladies
Speaker 1: who lunch completely antique, had absolutely no concept of how
Speaker 1: to do this thing at all. He then flamed out,
Speaker 1: and when he was there, I was asked by by
Speaker 1: Connyan asked to come in and sort of consult because
Speaker 1: I then left out and they thought, all of this
Speaker 1: young turk who you know who then split, let's bring
Speaker 1: her into American contyn asked to see whether she can
Speaker 1: help old Leo kind of get the thing right. And
Speaker 1: they paid you to consult. They paid me to consult,
Speaker 1: and I spent three months there and I realized that
Speaker 1: Leah was never going to get this right, that it
Speaker 1: was a complete fiasco. He was fiercely jealous of me
Speaker 1: anyway and didn't want me anywhere near it. And I realized, Hey,
Speaker 1: I could do this thing. Why am I being so timid?
Speaker 1: Wanted to? I then really wanted to. Yes, I decided
Speaker 1: I had made a mistake not sort of pitching myself
Speaker 1: to do it, that I should have myself to do it.
Speaker 1: I kind of felt what I had whipped out by
Speaker 1: not saying to them at the beginning, I'd love to
Speaker 1: do this. And from the time you finished a tattlet
Speaker 1: and then your consultancy less, how long before you take
Speaker 1: over Vanity Third It was about nine months, not even
Speaker 1: not even a year, and yeah, yeah, and I came back.
Speaker 1: So my Vanity Fair diaries really sort of begin at
Speaker 1: that time because I came in as a consultant in
Speaker 1: in the summer of eighty three with Leo, and the
Speaker 1: diaries sort of showed the rising realization that I should
Speaker 1: be the editor of this magazine. This magazine and I
Speaker 1: were made to make musing together. I left New York,
Speaker 1: went back to London, and they finally and brought me
Speaker 1: back as editor. In so to the extent that you
Speaker 1: can say, I mean all people really have in the
Speaker 1: popular culture is um devil wears product and all these
Speaker 1: very very kind of theatrical representations of the world of publishing.
Speaker 1: Is it really that one person has to dominate and
Speaker 1: their will has to call the day you had to
Speaker 1: sit there with a group of people say it's got
Speaker 1: to be this and this, that you took their advice,
Speaker 1: what did you do? I mean, a great editor isn't
Speaker 1: an autocrat. I mean, you have to have a vision
Speaker 1: in the same way the director has to have a
Speaker 1: vision of a movie, and you have to have a
Speaker 1: world view. Two. I mean, my my feeling was that
Speaker 1: Vanity Fair. I knew what I wanted to do with
Speaker 1: Vanity Fair. I wanted to combine the elegance and glamor
Speaker 1: of the magazine, of the famous magazine of the twenties
Speaker 1: and thirties, with some of that narrative grizzle of journalism
Speaker 1: that had then become the sort of defining feature of
Speaker 1: the great magazines of then the seventies and eighties, like
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone, like New York Magazine. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: modernize that formula, if you like, and then bring a
Speaker 1: kind of real modern spin. And the modern spin I
Speaker 1: brought because this was we were in the Reagan era, right,
Speaker 1: we just roll Reagan was on a glide path to
Speaker 1: re election. I came in as a London outsider who
Speaker 1: didn't know really much about America, and I was just
Speaker 1: plunged into this world of Reagan's America, which was this
Speaker 1: kind of black tie, wildly consumed imorish. You know, Bob,
Speaker 1: he was on the magazine. It was just I mean,
Speaker 1: it boggles my mind when I when I read the
Speaker 1: diaries now and when I started to compile them, how
Speaker 1: much we went out. I mean every night. It was
Speaker 1: like I had red nails and the long dress, and
Speaker 1: it was like the black tie dinners and New orven
Speaker 1: Higher New York. You know, Nancy Reagan and her Walkers,
Speaker 1: and Jerry Zipkin was this socialite with a face like
Speaker 1: a B Day That's exactly. You got those names and
Speaker 1: they were out there, you know, and it was enormous
Speaker 1: fund to cover it. And then in the meantime in
Speaker 1: then in l A there was all this kind of
Speaker 1: the rise of the spellings, you know, and Candy Spelling
Speaker 1: and the big houses and the monster mansions and the
Speaker 1: whole of this thing. So it was a wonderful world
Speaker 1: to cover. I sort of felt that our mission was
Speaker 1: to dramatize it, make it saying in our pages. And
Speaker 1: I had my very first hire as a writer actually
Speaker 1: was Dominant Done and Dominic Dunne. I first met when
Speaker 1: I came as a consultant in the summer at the
Speaker 1: dinner party of Marie Brenner, who was a vanity affair,
Speaker 1: and he was this out of work film producer, and
Speaker 1: he was next to me, and he was so great,
Speaker 1: and he was so entertaining and dinner and then he
Speaker 1: told me this horrendous story that his daughter had been
Speaker 1: murdered and he was on his way out to l
Speaker 1: A to the trial of his daughter's murderer. And I said,
Speaker 1: why don't you keep a diary? Being a great darist myself,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, keep a diary. Maybe you would
Speaker 1: make it into something to read, and I'd love to
Speaker 1: publish it. So he his eyes lit up, and off
Speaker 1: he went. And the piece that he brought back, which
Speaker 1: was published in the magazine, was an absolutely epic piece
Speaker 1: of sort of narrative personal journalism. So my very first
Speaker 1: high when I came back, and as editor at eighty four,
Speaker 1: I said to Nick, you know, I want you to
Speaker 1: be my first higher. I want to get a chowd
Speaker 1: of writers who can define the magazine. And that's, of
Speaker 1: course what he helped to do. Now, for those who
Speaker 1: don't know this, you kept copious diary entries. What is
Speaker 1: it about you that you're such a dead a can
Speaker 1: of diarist. I've tried that myself. I've got boxes when
Speaker 1: have books in them, and notebooks, and some of them
Speaker 1: have those little diary like looks them and you open
Speaker 1: and doesn't mean maybe like a week's worth of entries.
Speaker 1: And then Scotte, Well, I think I'm a compulsive reporter. Actually,
Speaker 1: I mean I have what I think of as observation greed. Right,
Speaker 1: most of the time I'm propelled to go out, not
Speaker 1: because I actually want to go out, but I think
Speaker 1: I got to see that, you know, I need to
Speaker 1: see that. Curious, I'm really curious, and I have a
Speaker 1: great desire to report on on on the action, if
Speaker 1: you like. So I I've always done that. I've always
Speaker 1: because I was alone. My husband at that time, Harry Evans,
Speaker 1: was actually in Washington working. It was a predigital era.
Speaker 1: So I would come back from these blacks I dinners
Speaker 1: and I would be on my own. I hadn't got
Speaker 1: kids at that moment, and I sat down and just
Speaker 1: it was like wanting to talk to a friend. And
Speaker 1: so it was literally sort of dear diary almost you
Speaker 1: know that, I just gushed it all that. Plus I
Speaker 1: was from London and so I it was all new
Speaker 1: to me. Everything about this place was wild. I had
Speaker 1: never seen such excess, such money as such you know,
Speaker 1: I was fascinating both in a sense so that it
Speaker 1: was a little decadent. My dad was a movie producer,
Speaker 1: he was there. My mom was Lawrence Olivier's assistant. No,
Speaker 1: she was Are you kidding me? Oh my god, I'd
Speaker 1: love to be Lawrence. How long was what a peasant? Rogan?
Speaker 1: Peasant slave? Am? I? She was about five years and
Speaker 1: then she married my my dad when she was a
Speaker 1: young woman. She was when she married when he was
Speaker 1: assistant when she was young and she then met my
Speaker 1: father at Pinewood Studios and and they got married, and
Speaker 1: then she became you know, he could have been your dad,
Speaker 1: as she played her card smartly. Actually more In o'harror
Speaker 1: could have been my mother, because my father married more
Speaker 1: In o'harror first. Yes, And it's very funny when when
Speaker 1: I found about ten years ago that More after my
Speaker 1: father just died and I was feeling particularly connected to him,
Speaker 1: I saw that Morgan her Horror was signing books, uh
Speaker 1: at some bookstore or wasn't it was the opening it
Speaker 1: was it was her movie, the famous Christmas movie right
Speaker 1: which I I Miracle onto Street, Miracle on thirty fourth Street.
Speaker 1: So she was there at the movie house. So I
Speaker 1: said to my little girl, you know, then we're going
Speaker 1: to go and see more in O'Hara because she was
Speaker 1: married to Grandpa, and you know, I've never met her,
Speaker 1: and I really wanted to produce myself. So I went
Speaker 1: to this thing and there was a big line. I
Speaker 1: interested myself was a miss O'Hara. I'm George Brown's daughter,
Speaker 1: and I thought she was going to say, how wonderful
Speaker 1: to see you, I mean George, and she turned around
Speaker 1: and she said to me that man had absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: to do with me. I have no desire to meet you. Goodbye.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. It was tragic. How sad, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean I was. I was aghast, but I have
Speaker 1: no idea. The backstory made me immediately think, what the
Speaker 1: hell really? So before your dad obviously was married to
Speaker 1: your mother and you and you were born to that family,
Speaker 1: your father had been married to O'Hara, divorced her, and
Speaker 1: then there's no so station with her whatsoever. What are
Speaker 1: some of the pictures your father produced? Um, he produced
Speaker 1: Guns at Batasia, the ms, Mark Marple's movies. You know,
Speaker 1: with Margaret Rutherford, you had no desire to go into
Speaker 1: the film business. No, because I kind of your father's
Speaker 1: making films. He's married Tom to Tatler. To me, editing
Speaker 1: and producing are very very similar. Do you ever want
Speaker 1: to make movies? The Vanity Fair Diary has been bought
Speaker 1: by has been optioned by Bruno Papandro, who did Big
Speaker 1: Little Lies, So we might see, you know that as
Speaker 1: a streaming video, which would be great for Maybe that's
Speaker 1: a sort of a toe hold in. I have lots
Speaker 1: of ideas for films, actually a lot. They're the same things.
Speaker 1: It's all about wrangling the story, storytelling, storytelling, tracking them
Speaker 1: the material, making the writer do the story you want,
Speaker 1: casting the thing. So I always felt actually the producing
Speaker 1: and writing were very similar. The story was the prism
Speaker 1: into an interesting world. I mean, Dominic Dunn's stories were
Speaker 1: particularly in that vein. I mean, he did a wonderful
Speaker 1: story about Betsy Bloomingdale, Alfred mistress Alfred Bloomingdale, the founder
Speaker 1: of a dinos card. His mistress, Vicky Morgan, was found
Speaker 1: murdered and they blamed this guy Marvin Pancost who beat
Speaker 1: at a death with a baseball back. But obviously the
Speaker 1: tension in the story was was she bummed off? Because
Speaker 1: there had been this huge palimony case, and so it
Speaker 1: allowed Nick Dunn to sort of get into the world
Speaker 1: of the Betsy Bloomingdale society around Mrs Reagan and tell
Speaker 1: the story of the sort of slightly dark side if
Speaker 1: you like, of Beverly Hill society. What would you describe
Speaker 1: Nick Dunn? Though? I mean I I sensed in my
Speaker 1: tracking of Nick Dunn's career that he was kind of
Speaker 1: a certain type of writer. Then he became after that
Speaker 1: with his own the murder of his daughter and his
Speaker 1: articles like the Bloomingdale when he becomes like Tales of Hollywood,
Speaker 1: he gets a little pulpy. Well, actually he brings a
Speaker 1: kind of passionate pursuit of justice to it. Actually, so
Speaker 1: when for instance, he did the story of the class
Speaker 1: Form Bulah murder case in which class Form Bulah been
Speaker 1: accused of trying to kill his wife who was then
Speaker 1: in a coma from Sonny von Bulow, that was a
Speaker 1: way for him to get into the world of Newport
Speaker 1: and that high society. But it also allowed him to
Speaker 1: to sort of pursue justice on behalf of the children.
Speaker 1: So what actually did motivate nicko did make him better
Speaker 1: than pulpy, was that he he was always trying to
Speaker 1: plead to solve things for the victim because you know,
Speaker 1: he felt himself with the victim's rights crusade victims, and
Speaker 1: that's what gave his pieces such hard So when you
Speaker 1: say you want to go into a world which one
Speaker 1: to dis intrigued the hell out of you, you said,
Speaker 1: there a God. I love this piece, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the foreign stories we did, I absolutely loved. I mean,
Speaker 1: we did a wonderful piece about baby Doc that got
Speaker 1: into the strange sort of voodooe atmosphere of Haiti at
Speaker 1: the time. We did wonderful stories about Africa. Alex Schumutov
Speaker 1: was a fantastic right of us. He did the sort
Speaker 1: of definitive piece about the murder of Diane Fossey, the naturalist,
Speaker 1: and what he was so great about that pieces. Everyone
Speaker 1: was writing about her as a great environmentalist who had
Speaker 1: been sort of kill uh, you know, because of her
Speaker 1: pursuit of against the poachers, But what it really came
Speaker 1: out was how troubled she was herself as a woman,
Speaker 1: and how actually she she really hated the poachers more
Speaker 1: than she loved the animals. That this woman was a
Speaker 1: really disturbed woman actually as a tree and it was
Speaker 1: and it was a very interesting sort of look at this,
Speaker 1: but how what makes a woman live on the edge
Speaker 1: like that? So these are the kind of stories that
Speaker 1: drove me and to make me a sign of story,
Speaker 1: I have to feel this abiding curiosity is like what
Speaker 1: is the real story here? Like what are we missing
Speaker 1: in all of this? And there are some stories which
Speaker 1: just grabbed my imagination. I mean I look at someone
Speaker 1: like Rex Tillerson now and I just think what a
Speaker 1: great story. Rex Tillerson is not because of the obvious things.
Speaker 1: He's Secretary of State, like what's happening? But I see
Speaker 1: him as a hugely comic character, you know. I to me,
Speaker 1: the story is big corporate ceo whoeveryone is saluted, you
Speaker 1: know who, who's God in the bad room? And now
Speaker 1: he stumbled into this completely insane mess, this looniar ban,
Speaker 1: and he's still playing it as a straight man to
Speaker 1: be going somewhere where he's just dismissed or ignored or
Speaker 1: he's und control. Now, somebody said about about Tennison, who
Speaker 1: knows him to meet he Rex runs a very crisp meeting,
Speaker 1: And I was just thinking, like a crisp meeting is
Speaker 1: the opposite of what he's in. I mean, he's now
Speaker 1: in this rambling, insane asylum, and it's like the message
Speaker 1: has gone completely off. I just can't imagine him working
Speaker 1: for someone else. Wasn't somebody that he had just that
Speaker 1: he thought was impeccable Tillerson working for him? It just
Speaker 1: seems like inconceivable to me. Uh so you're at Vanity
Speaker 1: Fair for what length of time? I was ever eight
Speaker 1: and a half years, and you know, when I took
Speaker 1: it over, they had twelve pages of advertising. And by
Speaker 1: the end, of course you didn't turn into this juggonnaut
Speaker 1: We had one point two million circulation to on fifty
Speaker 1: pages of ads. But you know, about a year and
Speaker 1: a half in new house was actually about to close it.
Speaker 1: And he was almost like a kind of James Thurber
Speaker 1: character because he was this short, nervous never she a
Speaker 1: little man. Yeah, if you you know, he was completely shy.
Speaker 1: I mean he wants, you know, very touchingly kind of
Speaker 1: We were riding home in the car and you know,
Speaker 1: he said to me, I don't think that I don't
Speaker 1: really think I have any power. You know, I have
Speaker 1: no power, And I was thinking wodom and I said,
Speaker 1: but say, you know, you own Random House, you know.
Speaker 1: He said, yeah, but if I told publishers what book
Speaker 1: to buy, they wouldn't pay any attention to me. And
Speaker 1: I said, well, well, look at all the magazines. He said, yes,
Speaker 1: but you know the magazine editors don't really, I mean
Speaker 1: I don't think that they don't. Could stop me and
Speaker 1: he said actually, and then he mentioned Mr Shan, who
Speaker 1: was the editor of The New York at the time.
Speaker 1: He said, and I find it very hard to get
Speaker 1: Mr Sean on the phone. So I thought it was
Speaker 1: so touching in a way because here was this huge
Speaker 1: mobile but he never started his company, and he did
Speaker 1: love his editors to be stars. I mean, in a
Speaker 1: way it was great because you know sometimes corporate people
Speaker 1: are sort of don't like their employees to have attention,
Speaker 1: and they're sort of you have to be careful because
Speaker 1: you don't get too much attention. And he loved it.
Speaker 1: He loved he said it as being started. And you
Speaker 1: know there was me that was Anna Winter there was
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, he liked that, and he saw
Speaker 1: us as his studio. Really, where's all the big money
Speaker 1: come in? Does her own billboards, TV stations, radio? Well,
Speaker 1: the money. Really there was him and his brother Donald,
Speaker 1: and his father Sam, who was another tiny, never shoot,
Speaker 1: little fellow with a lot of drive, you know, built
Speaker 1: this huge newspaper empire from this New Jersey newspaper he
Speaker 1: began at the beginning, and then he bought naples in
Speaker 1: every town and soon they had this huge newspaper empire.
Speaker 1: So the cash cow was the newspapers actually, and his
Speaker 1: brother Donald ran the newspaper company, and then Sam, the
Speaker 1: old man, began to get social aspirations and one day
Speaker 1: his wife, legend says, says, you know how much she'd
Speaker 1: like him to buy a copy of Vogue. And he
Speaker 1: came back and he bought her. He miss in you
Speaker 1: how she bought the company, bought her conin us essentially
Speaker 1: because she had decided she wanted to now be a
Speaker 1: lady who lunches a little bit, you know, and nothing
Speaker 1: was better for that than glossy magazines. So the lost
Speaker 1: the magazines began sort of that way. S I basically
Speaker 1: decided he loved magazines. He always had it. He was
Speaker 1: the east Field in the family. Actually, you know, he
Speaker 1: appreciated art. He was fascinated by glamor and magazine a
Speaker 1: culture so he was much better fit for the magazines,
Speaker 1: for the newspapers, and he became a really great magazine publisher,
Speaker 1: and Vanity Fair in Vogue were enormously profitable. They were
Speaker 1: in the end. Yeah, we took it from I mean,
Speaker 1: at the beginning Vanity Fell lost fourteen million dollars and
Speaker 1: then I came in and by the time I left,
Speaker 1: it was in profit. And now, of course, you know,
Speaker 1: after years, it's it's a big cash because that his
Speaker 1: gift that he placed the bet, and he stayed with
Speaker 1: the bet. He didn't he didn't falter. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: what was so great. He stayed with it, and he
Speaker 1: really backed me. I mean, now there was a moment
Speaker 1: of tremor there. I mean a year and a half in,
Speaker 1: you know, we were very much liked by readers, but
Speaker 1: the advertisers were lagging and it was still losing money.
Speaker 1: And I was off in the West Coast about to
Speaker 1: go on the MERV Griffin Show to talk about this
Speaker 1: great cover we had on the Reagans Dancing and Kissing,
Speaker 1: which was one of our great colors. I suddenly realized that,
Speaker 1: you know, everybody I was trying to hire I was
Speaker 1: getting installed. And I called up the office and I said,
Speaker 1: what's happening? And they said, well, you better come back
Speaker 1: and talk to Mr. Newhouse, which I did. Only did
Speaker 1: discover that he was on the point of folding the
Speaker 1: magazine and I had to really surprise you. I was
Speaker 1: a ghasp. I said, you can't and I showed him
Speaker 1: everything I had on the verge. We're on the verge,
Speaker 1: and he gave us another He said, okay, you've got
Speaker 1: another year. And in that year we really pulled it
Speaker 1: out because that's when we had the big class form people.
Speaker 1: Do you think, what do you think it is about you?
Speaker 1: The guy new House to give you another year? What's
Speaker 1: it about you? What's your gift? Actually? What is it
Speaker 1: about him? Really? Because well I showed him what we had.
Speaker 1: You know, I believe, Do you believe? I believed? And
Speaker 1: I you know, I called everybody in the company. I
Speaker 1: just galvanized everybody to just work on him. And I said,
Speaker 1: you've got to give us. Actually, he said, you've got
Speaker 1: two years, and I always knew that was really a year.
Speaker 1: You know, when they say two years, it is really
Speaker 1: a year. So when the magazine blasts off under your
Speaker 1: tenure and becomes this must read for everybody. When does
Speaker 1: it become a parenty, that's time to go. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: very restless type. I mean in the same way I
Speaker 1: left Tatler After Vanity Fair. I've been there for it
Speaker 1: in a half years. I had two children. I didn't
Speaker 1: I didn't want to. I was actually feeling a little restless,
Speaker 1: but I had the young kids, so I didn't want
Speaker 1: to be married to Harold. By now married to Harold,
Speaker 1: I had a child of three and of war one
Speaker 1: of one, and I was willing to get restive. I
Speaker 1: was also kind of tired of the celebrity culture stuff.
Speaker 1: Actually that well, I got tired of the conversation, which is,
Speaker 1: what can Madonna do Thursday or can she do Friday?
Speaker 1: You know she doesn't like the photographer. It was Cadys
Speaker 1: began to kind of which was your stock? And you
Speaker 1: had to kill They were all bread and butter, and
Speaker 1: you know they saw the magazine. Of course, Vanity Fair
Speaker 1: editor Tina Brown. The second half of our conversation covers
Speaker 1: live after Vanity Fair. Her first stop was The New Yorker.
Speaker 1: She was succeeded there by David Remnick, whom she hired
Speaker 1: on Here's the Thing. Remnick told me there's no official
Speaker 1: system for develop up in future New Yorker contributors, so
Speaker 1: you might get lucky. The farm system is the mail.
Speaker 1: The farm system is whoever sending us stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: people think I'm kidding around. People email me every day.
Speaker 1: I probably get fifteen emails a day that go directly
Speaker 1: to me, because my email is not that hard to
Speaker 1: figure out. I have an idea. Here's my short story.
Speaker 1: Now most of them are not going to work. Once
Speaker 1: in a while, though, it happens. Here more stories from
Speaker 1: The New Yorker's David Remnick had Here's the Thing dot org.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing. Tina Brown retired of catering to celebrities at
Speaker 1: Vanity Fair. She was in the running to be transferred
Speaker 1: to the New Jewel and Condie Nass Crown the New Yorker.
Speaker 1: Things weren't going well there, but the old guard didn't
Speaker 1: want rescuing. By the likes of Tina browns were flying
Speaker 1: rather like the beginning when when I kept hearing about
Speaker 1: Vanity Fair, so I had bought The New Yorker. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, sign new house. He had got rid of
Speaker 1: Mr Shawan, the great legendary editor, and put in Bob
Speaker 1: got Leeb who's a fantastic book editor, but a bit
Speaker 1: like his mistake at Vanity Fair. It didn't make him
Speaker 1: a great magazine Edity. The fact that he was a
Speaker 1: great book is a different thing. And those people who
Speaker 1: would disagree with you are those people who they were
Speaker 1: pretty happy with Bob gottleieb as the editor. Because we're
Speaker 1: going to get to the subject of the resistance. You agree, No, Actually,
Speaker 1: I think the people at the New Yorker. I mean
Speaker 1: Bob Gotley was unlucky because he followed a great legend,
Speaker 1: had been there for thirty years, forty years, right, Mr
Speaker 1: Shawn was one of the great legends. It was Mr Shawan,
Speaker 1: Mr Shwan, and you had put on white gloves to
Speaker 1: speak to him. And so Paul Boal Gottley then came
Speaker 1: into the situation where everybody was very upset about now.
Speaker 1: But then he didn't really know how to do a magazine.
Speaker 1: And you know, he did some good things, but so
Speaker 1: but when I came in, he said, I'd just done
Speaker 1: a cover with the Vanity Fair with Demi Moore, Nick
Speaker 1: and pregnant, and it was something of a sensation. Was
Speaker 1: the least wonderful thing we ever worked with. And so
Speaker 1: they thought, here comes this the girl who did. I'm
Speaker 1: under the impression that the New Yorker it was divided.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't I don't have any empirical daddy here,
Speaker 1: but it was divided into two groups. Those who were
Speaker 1: elated you were coming to kind of save the magazine
Speaker 1: and making improve the sales, and those who felt that
Speaker 1: you weren't. You know, you'd left the Oxford behind and
Speaker 1: you were more tatler than Oxford exactly. And you know,
Speaker 1: I understand why they were nervous, frankly, I mean, why
Speaker 1: wouldn't they be. But at the very first meeting that
Speaker 1: I had at the New York Or there was all
Speaker 1: of this when I was the first woman, obviously because
Speaker 1: I've only been for it, isn't they all been men?
Speaker 1: So I come into this room and there were all
Speaker 1: of these men sitting around the table and talk about
Speaker 1: the talk about that, what's it like for a woman
Speaker 1: who's in charge. Well, it was in a place like
Speaker 1: that where I think they were a bit more old
Speaker 1: guard at the times. On these places here, women don't
Speaker 1: always have a great time well, one of the writers,
Speaker 1: and I think it was could an endemic, referred to
Speaker 1: me as the girl and the wrong dress, okay, which
Speaker 1: really explains in a nutshell the attitude to me, which is, like,
Speaker 1: what is she doing coming in here this? You know,
Speaker 1: there's a woman who doesn't understand us. And you know,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of resistance, and I think some
Speaker 1: of it was misogynist, There's no doubt about it. They
Speaker 1: really I just blazed through it, you know. I mean
Speaker 1: you you just like I just raged through it, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and I want some of them around too,
Speaker 1: you know, actually, because what I found was, you know,
Speaker 1: one thing, I'm a big believer, and he's really listening
Speaker 1: to who's there, right, So I didn't go in and
Speaker 1: do stuff like just for everybody. I mean I did
Speaker 1: for actually seventy people in the end, but I did
Speaker 1: listen to who was there, and I really made quick
Speaker 1: distinctions about who I thought had it and who didn't.
Speaker 1: And there was some wonderful older people there, I mean,
Speaker 1: people like John Updyke and Roger Angel and I mean
Speaker 1: Lilian Ross. These people were absolutely fabinous and golden and
Speaker 1: they actually did welcome me. The people who didn't welcome
Speaker 1: me were the sort of year old actually who felt
Speaker 1: our identity depended on the New Yorker. I found that
Speaker 1: the Greatest Generation group, like Brendan Gill and Roger Angel
Speaker 1: were confident enough not to feel their whole identity dependent
Speaker 1: on the fake IVY if you like. Of the William
Speaker 1: Shawn commntal, I mean John Updike was up for a venture.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was sick of doing book reviews. You know,
Speaker 1: he was quite happy to go off and write about
Speaker 1: Oscar and Night or something, you know, I mean it
Speaker 1: was it was interesting. Then what did you say to yourself?
Speaker 1: What needed to change their Well, what I wanted to
Speaker 1: do was to hire a bunch of amazing writers who
Speaker 1: I felt hiring Hiring was job one, and I did.
Speaker 1: I mean, I heard David Remney, you know who succeeded me.
Speaker 1: I had Malcolm Gladwell. I had Jeffrey Tubin, I had
Speaker 1: Jane Mayer. I had Anthony Lane from London John Lar
Speaker 1: wonderful film with John Lar, who I don't like saying
Speaker 1: that because film critics are always kind to me in
Speaker 1: the point, but Lanes a wonderful writer, wonderful writer, absolutely marvelous.
Speaker 1: He was only twenty seven when I heard him. You know,
Speaker 1: I had your own group when the great medical writer
Speaker 1: and actual Gowandi and Henry Lewis Gates. I mean, I
Speaker 1: didn't bring in the most amazing writers and they're all
Speaker 1: still there. And I also brought in some amazing editors too,
Speaker 1: And I actually brought in a lot of women. I
Speaker 1: mean my executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, who is still my
Speaker 1: managing editor, Pat McCarthy was still there. They were all
Speaker 1: of these great women that I brought into some people
Speaker 1: a lot. When you do that, describe without naming names,
Speaker 1: what's what's that process like? Well, no, one, No. As
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, I actually think it, Uh, you
Speaker 1: really need to be very sensitive when you when you
Speaker 1: are hiring people. I didn't always get it right. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it blows up and it gets it's wrong or I
Speaker 1: didn't do it right. But when I did it right,
Speaker 1: I actually think it takes several conversations because what I
Speaker 1: learned was the first conversation you have to try to
Speaker 1: explain that this isn't working out, but they don't hear it,
Speaker 1: and there's a second conversation, and then the third conversation
Speaker 1: you want someone else to have the conversation. But you know,
Speaker 1: I do feel keeping dignity is incredibly important. Do you
Speaker 1: argue on the side of being generous in terms of
Speaker 1: seferences and people who they really think they're gonna have
Speaker 1: this job for the rest of their lives but don't. Well.
Speaker 1: One of the things that was so great about new
Speaker 1: House because I couldn't be generous, so that he let
Speaker 1: me be. He was generous, He really was, actually, I
Speaker 1: mean that was one of the great things about say
Speaker 1: he didn't as long. You know, once he decided to
Speaker 1: move on, there was never an argument about this person
Speaker 1: is having tir a lawyer to say I need more.
Speaker 1: You know. He was very generous like that. He would
Speaker 1: just say to people when he had my predecessor at
Speaker 1: Vantity Fair, he said, look, I'm going to fire him,
Speaker 1: but I'll keep him on for life, and I'll tell
Speaker 1: him he can go to Europe. Do I see you?
Speaker 1: I mean, who does that? Honestly, I mean it's pretty unusual.
Speaker 1: And so SI was wonderful, like, very very generous. And
Speaker 1: you know, we had a tough time, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of getting this thing to work. I mean it was
Speaker 1: losing uh twenty million when I took it over was
Speaker 1: that why was that? Where have those readers gone? Well?
Speaker 1: It aged, you know it simply that they had really aged,
Speaker 1: and we just needed to to completely spruce up the end,
Speaker 1: windows up on the windows. And actually I brought photography
Speaker 1: into The New Yorker, which I had never had. I
Speaker 1: brought Richard avan And to take pictures. I had our
Speaker 1: Speedlman to be one of the cover artists. I brought
Speaker 1: in his wife, frans Wis Mooley to be the art director.
Speaker 1: So I really brought my visual sense to them. So
Speaker 1: you bring the tools you have for the other magazines
Speaker 1: to this with some changes, and I resigned it. I
Speaker 1: mean we really sort of facelifted it but kept its
Speaker 1: kind of purity. But where you have um where you
Speaker 1: talk about coming from Vanity Fair with an abundance if
Speaker 1: you will, not exclusively so, but an abundance of celebrity culture,
Speaker 1: you come into the New Yorker, do you decide you
Speaker 1: have to have some you need to start to insert
Speaker 1: a little of that DNA into the New Yorker as well.
Speaker 1: A tad friend, actually I did, so, Yeah, he's excellent,
Speaker 1: But in fact, the one I would beg to differ
Speaker 1: about that well, we're gonna have an argument about that.
Speaker 1: That's okay, okay, I'll leave that with you. UM. For instance,
Speaker 1: Jeff Tubin, who I had as our legal sort of analyst.
Speaker 1: He was an assistant d A at the time, young
Speaker 1: assistant d A, and I wanted to cover a law
Speaker 1: when the O. J. Simpson story broke, Jeff actually had
Speaker 1: had two or three pieces that hadn't worked out, and
Speaker 1: I was begin to think, oh my god, I made
Speaker 1: a mistake with this guy. Jeff le talk about the
Speaker 1: Clintons is one of my favorite books, Such a wonderful water.
Speaker 1: But he went off to l A. I said, why
Speaker 1: don't you just go and cover this O. J. Simpson
Speaker 1: thing and see whether this pants out. That story just
Speaker 1: took ahold of Jeff. He broke news on it, and
Speaker 1: he became And what was wonderful was he brought his
Speaker 1: kind of legal rigor to the story, but at the
Speaker 1: same time it was the great compulsively glitzy story of
Speaker 1: our time. That's what I think I did bring into
Speaker 1: the New Yorker DNA was a sense that, you know,
Speaker 1: by doing Jeff Tubin on on on O. J. Simpson,
Speaker 1: I kind of set that table which now today where
Speaker 1: Rodan Farah can do Harvey Weinstein. It's a legitimate subject matter.
Speaker 1: So how long are you with the New Yorker? I
Speaker 1: was in The New Yorker for nearly seven years. Did
Speaker 1: you keep a New Yorker diary? Less off alas? Because
Speaker 1: it was a weekly and I had a kid, and
Speaker 1: you know, so it was much harder for me to
Speaker 1: do it, and I you know, I regret that I
Speaker 1: didn't write it with as much kind of intensity and
Speaker 1: detail that I did Vanity Fair diaries. So I didn't
Speaker 1: do as much. And then after six and a half
Speaker 1: seven years, I've been kind to get frustrated there because
Speaker 1: I always felt The New Yorker should be more by
Speaker 1: the end, that it should be more than a magazine.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see it be a radio show, a
Speaker 1: book company. Just described real quickly, how is it different
Speaker 1: at the New Yorker? Well, comparing trash the two, it
Speaker 1: was much more open warfare against me at the New
Speaker 1: Yorker at the beginning, you know, because we had this
Speaker 1: huge kind of pushback from the old Guard, expecting that
Speaker 1: this was going to be me putting Demi Moore and
Speaker 1: in the magazine, I mean, fristus, the cartoonist Bob Mankoff.
Speaker 1: He thought that I was going to cancel all of
Speaker 1: cartoons and just put pictures in, and of course it
Speaker 1: was the reverse was true. I actually gave the car
Speaker 1: Bob Mankoff. I made him cartoon editor, and I actually
Speaker 1: gave you know, him a whole cartoon issue every Christmas
Speaker 1: to do. But he had a documentary out of it,
Speaker 1: and he got a documentary, and I started the cartoon
Speaker 1: bank and all of these things that he's wonderful. He's
Speaker 1: absolutely we became the best of friends. But but for
Speaker 1: the first two or three years it was this kind
Speaker 1: of what is she trying to do? But then I
Speaker 1: think what happened basically was that a lot of the
Speaker 1: defective left the new amazing people were so good. I mean,
Speaker 1: when you have people like Room Nick and Nick Hertzberg
Speaker 1: who are brought in and I love him so dearly.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's the cleverest and the best, and you
Speaker 1: know that talk. It was like a graft. It was
Speaker 1: like a skin graph, right. And there was a wonderful
Speaker 1: moment actually when I was having a sandwich with John
Speaker 1: Updyke in the office and before he came Anthony Lane
Speaker 1: the film critics said to me, oh, here having lunch
Speaker 1: with John Updyck. I am, He's my hero. I just
Speaker 1: want to meet him. So I said, okay, well I'm
Speaker 1: in the middle of lunch, you know. Just knock on
Speaker 1: the door and I'll introduce you to John. Knock, knock
Speaker 1: through the and as he comes in, John Updyke jumps
Speaker 1: up and says, Anthony Leane, I've been so looking forward
Speaker 1: to meeting you. It was a wonderful moment because it
Speaker 1: was you saw the blood exchange had happened, you know,
Speaker 1: which was the older guarden. And from that moment, really,
Speaker 1: you know, it all settled down and we were soon
Speaker 1: the most amazingly exciting. When the time comes to leave
Speaker 1: the New Yorker, I mean, I'm sure, having taken two
Speaker 1: magazines and really, well we'll throw a tattler. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: but but here in the U s fantity there in
Speaker 1: the New Yorker and having tremendous success with them in
Speaker 1: a new house behind you, what did you fantasize would
Speaker 1: be next? Well, I had this fantasy of an extended
Speaker 1: media laterally, you see, as I said, I wanted to
Speaker 1: do radio's books, TV shows out of the New Yorker
Speaker 1: brand sign your house. For all of his wonderfulness did
Speaker 1: not get that. That's where he stumbled, actually, because frankly
Speaker 1: had he done that twenty years ago. I mean this
Speaker 1: was I didn't understand where we were heading. He did
Speaker 1: not understand where we were headed. Conn didn't miss the
Speaker 1: miss the trick when it came to getting ahead of
Speaker 1: that curve. I mean, the things that I told side
Speaker 1: to do in the nineties were the things that they
Speaker 1: should have done because I was I did see it early,
Speaker 1: probably too early and too early for him to see
Speaker 1: your sound nuts. It was like settled down on do
Speaker 1: your magazine and like go back to your knittings, Go
Speaker 1: have lunch with updates, Go have lunch with up that.
Speaker 1: Yet I was thinking I wanted So along comes a
Speaker 1: person who has been in the news lately, Mr Harvey Weinstein,
Speaker 1: who comes to me and says, I want you to
Speaker 1: come and do a magazine with Mirrormax. You can do books,
Speaker 1: you can do films, you can do all of these
Speaker 1: things that you have. The idea you had want to
Speaker 1: back you talk is the magazine Talk magazine. We just
Speaker 1: called it. So I said, okay, I'll do this, and
Speaker 1: I thought that he was the sort of the missing
Speaker 1: piece of entrepreneurial verve that was going to help me
Speaker 1: develop these thoughts. And you know, I leapt out of
Speaker 1: the Ivory Tower into a well. I wanted it to
Speaker 1: be a rough and tumble thing. I was ready for that.
Speaker 1: I had been at the Court of Louis the fourteenth,
Speaker 1: as it were, for seventeen years, and I thought this
Speaker 1: would be exciting and rugged. And I'm going to know,
Speaker 1: how does a new house compared to Harvey Weinstein? Oh
Speaker 1: my god, I mean, you know, it was like a
Speaker 1: bad dream. New House was always sort of courteous, always warm,
Speaker 1: really and difficult, but he was a gentleman. He was
Speaker 1: generally he could mean, he could be very difficult, he
Speaker 1: could be very irritating, but he was never abusive or
Speaker 1: in any way inappropriate. And I find it unbelievable that
Speaker 1: Harvey was abusive to you. Well, he was actually I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I mean he basically was. Well he Harvey.
Speaker 1: The problem with Harvy is here, and I immediately had
Speaker 1: a completely opposed vision of what it should be. I mean,
Speaker 1: I wanted to leave the New Yorker and Vanity Fair
Speaker 1: to do something obviously different, from either of them, right.
Speaker 1: I had this concept of a literary news magazine that
Speaker 1: was going to be like in a European news magazine.
Speaker 1: I was in love with magazines like Perry, Match and Stern,
Speaker 1: and I love those magazines, and I wanted to do
Speaker 1: a European news magazine with a New Yorker quality type
Speaker 1: face and content with amazing photography like Perry Matt. That
Speaker 1: was the idea, with a cover with multiple images on
Speaker 1: it and all of the things that hadn't been really
Speaker 1: done here. I love those magazines. I did the first
Speaker 1: couple couple of issues. They were amazingly good. But when
Speaker 1: within about two months, I mean Harvey immediately started to say,
Speaker 1: I want Vanity Fair with you to just a copy
Speaker 1: Vanity Fair. I want you to have you know, Matt
Speaker 1: Damon on the cover. I want you to say completely
Speaker 1: and I you know. And it became so frustrating to
Speaker 1: me because I felt that I was being forced into
Speaker 1: this kind of celebrity journalism again, but in this wildly
Speaker 1: unstable environment where also I was having a very hand
Speaker 1: fisted way by the hand fisted when it wasn't what
Speaker 1: I wanted to do, and I found it very, very
Speaker 1: distracting and hiring and firing. Was that another point of friction.
Speaker 1: I have my own team at first, but I did find,
Speaker 1: of course that Harvey wanted to go around town of
Speaker 1: signing things all the time, and I mean that never
Speaker 1: happened before. The deals that were made by Harvey for
Speaker 1: for Talk and for the book publisher was flight attendance
Speaker 1: on private jets, So there was a lot of that.
Speaker 1: I would run into a person who would tell me
Speaker 1: that his piece was coming in on Wednesday, you know,
Speaker 1: and I would say, what peace, you know, and how
Speaker 1: am I going to pay for it? Because it was
Speaker 1: also my budget that was like streaming out the door.
Speaker 1: So I, you know, I felt extremely frustrated with it,
Speaker 1: but you know, it was having leapt out of the
Speaker 1: New Yorker, obviously, it was. It was heartbreaking. It was
Speaker 1: heartbreaking really what happened. Of course, then it didn't go
Speaker 1: well because you know that it lasted for two years
Speaker 1: and then actually nine eleven really put the kibosh on
Speaker 1: it because then advertising disappeared and then you were going
Speaker 1: to have to have deep pockets behind you. Did you
Speaker 1: walk away? Just was like you got a car service
Speaker 1: and took off and never spoke to him again or
Speaker 1: was an actually know, as a matter of fact, you know,
Speaker 1: I stayed on perfectly okay terms with Harvey after that.
Speaker 1: I mean, at the end of the day, it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, what happened happened. So you write the thing
Speaker 1: about Lady Diana, who I met once in one and something.
Speaker 1: She was so much more beautiful and more interesting in person.
Speaker 1: It almost didn't do her justice. She was stunning, stunning,
Speaker 1: and it was all about the coloring. I mean it
Speaker 1: was this piece is gorgeous, peach felvet face and this
Speaker 1: huge olympid blue feeling eyes. Didn't realize I did. I did,
Speaker 1: and I always felt like you did. In fact, I
Speaker 1: had lunch with her in New York about six weeks
Speaker 1: before she died, and when she walked into the Four Seasons,
Speaker 1: it was just so she's so stunning, you know, because
Speaker 1: she's so huge. I mean, she's like this gazelle who's like,
Speaker 1: you know, six ft something. It felt, you know, in
Speaker 1: the shoes and the eyes that were just so enormous,
Speaker 1: and yet she was so lonely, talked about loneliness and
Speaker 1: how you know in August she was dreading August because
Speaker 1: the children were going off to stay with Charles and
Speaker 1: pal Moral and how she she said, nobody wants me
Speaker 1: to have me to stay. And I said, what are
Speaker 1: you talking about. Everybody wants to have you know, she said,
Speaker 1: you said the paparazzi calm and they go through your garbage,
Speaker 1: and you know, you just said, it's just horrible to
Speaker 1: have me to stay. She said, I am, you know,
Speaker 1: I have nowhere to go in August my children. And
Speaker 1: I just thought how extraordinary it was that she felt
Speaker 1: that lonely. But it also did explain when you learned
Speaker 1: of her deaths, you know, six weeks later or whatever
Speaker 1: it was, what she was doing in the south of France.
Speaker 1: I mean, she was really there because she was so lonely.
Speaker 1: And along time the al Fayette family, you have what
Speaker 1: you call all the toys are either planes and the
Speaker 1: bodyguards and you know, and the chauffeurs and stuff. So
Speaker 1: Jackie Kennedy marrying on exactly the same. Some of the
Speaker 1: most prominent figures, I mean, your peers, if you will,
Speaker 1: in terms of their prominence in the publishing world. Graydon
Speaker 1: is leaving, Robbie Meyer and Jan sold the business, and
Speaker 1: I'm wondering it's just technology. I mean, I think digital
Speaker 1: disruption has become so intense that for many of them
Speaker 1: it was like, look, I had a great time, and
Speaker 1: let's leave this now to someone who couldn't just do
Speaker 1: this reinvention because I did my stuff. You could have
Speaker 1: kept going, did you well? No. I decided to start
Speaker 1: a live media company because I felt that it was
Speaker 1: no longer about stories and pictures and captions and words,
Speaker 1: which is what I love to do, and had become
Speaker 1: all about how am I going to get the revenue stream?
Speaker 1: What is the digital platform? You know, all of that
Speaker 1: anguish that is about process as opposed to stories. And
Speaker 1: so I now do many of these live events where
Speaker 1: I can at least showcase incredible stories and put them
Speaker 1: on the stage and have people watching them, which is
Speaker 1: what we do with women in the world because just
Speaker 1: magazines cannot anymore survive. This is Kathleen Russo and that
Speaker 1: was my summer staff pick. I hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing. We'll be back with Alec next week.
Speaker 1: Four