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| June, 2002 | Razor
The Rise and Perhaps Temporary Fall of the Unsinkable Tina Brown
by Russ Baker
Tina
Brown’s August 1999 party to introduce Talk magazine, like many of
her fetes over the years, was a triumph of glitz. After sparring
with the famously difficult New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and failing to
land the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a dramatic stretch of urban waterfront, she’d
audaciously rented Liberty Island. Now, Lady Liberty, a gift from France,
welcomed not the huddled masses but the coddled elites. The island
was lit with Japanese lanterns and decked out in red carpets, and the
crowd was dressed for an Oscar party; no matter that stiletto heels got
caught in the grass and caused more than a few tumbles. The Anglo-Indian
writer Salman Rushdie, defying the fatwa issued against him by
Islamic clerics, was spotted wandering alone before he met the delectable
model and food writer, Padma Lakshmi (for whom he subsequently left his
wife). The wizened Henry Kissinger chatted up a supermodel at the buffet.
Madonna floated through. A writer on the dance floor became aware of some
gangly geek bumping him; on closer inspection, it was Quentin Tarantino.
There were lavish picnic baskets and fireworks, Paul Newman standing next
to you and Matthew Broderick your tablemate. The economy was flush,
terrorism was someone else’s problem -- this was the limitlessly happy
late-90s. “I made out with some guy and it just felt completely fun,
total chaos,” says Virginia Heffernan, a young editor on the magazine who
hails from a small New Hampshire town. “And the ferry that I was on—Kate
Moss was drunk on it and I just felt like part of some hilarious Gatsby-esque
world. At the end, I just thought, God bless Tina.”
When, two and a half years later, Tina
Brown’s enormously hyped venture failed, it seemed like more than the end
of a magazine; it felt like the end of an era.
---
Tina had been the magazine business’s
golden girl. She’d graduated from Oxford, then made a precocious and
consistent climb up the ladder of the publishing world. To each rung,
first the gossipy British society chronicle Tatler, then
Manhattan’s upscale Vanity Fair and The New Yorker,
she brought a fresh vitality, a “buzz” (her favorite word) that she alone
held the secret to. In that sense she was a huge success, although it
depended whom you asked: the novelist Tom Wolfe—no fan of the old New
Yorker-- said she’d improved that magazine , while her frequent
subject Hillary Clinton called Tina “the Junk Food of Journalism.”
Tina was a good magazine editor because
she was a generalist, a sort of everywoman with a middlebrow tabloid
sensibility and a short attention span. She had little patience for
anything where the payoff, the entertainment value, was not immediately
evident. This manifested itself in seemingly contradictory ways: it meant
a fascination with the most ephemeral of matters and people, but
occasionally spawned meaningful pieces of investigative reporting. She
also had very good instincts: She seemed able to predict, for example,
which new television shows would survive their baptismal.
Whatever people thought of her, she had
concluded by 1998 that editing The New Yorker, long considered the
best magazine in America, was no longer right for her. She was supposedly
growing tired of the grind of a weekly magazine, of fighting the in-house
bureaucracy, and of the constant war with the old-line, powerful writers
who resented her frantic style and contempt for long, leisurely articles
on obscure topics. Then Harvey Weinstein came calling. Weinstein, head of
the powerful Miramax Pictures, a crass, slovenly dealmaker whom Tina had
helped professionally over the years with favorable coverage of him, his
stars and his films, told her he was looking to start a magazine as part
of a “synergy” project where articles might become TV pilots or movies,
books might become movies, articles might become books, and so on. For
Weinstein, creating Talk was in good measure an image decision. Up
until their smash hit Shakespeare in Love, he and his brother Bob
were the Rodney Dangerfields of Hollywood – they couldn’t get no respect.
Now they were sought-after. Talk would provide him with adaptable
movie material, boost his own credibility and give him literary cachet.
Tina responded enthusiastically. She
would get her own magazine, a huge salary, and a piece of any profits. And
she would be mounting an exciting new challenge, a chance to build a
magazine from scratch, her way. She recruited Ron Galotti, the
high-powered, cigar-toting former Vanity Fair and Vogue
Publisher, and inspiration for the Mr. Big character in the popular
television show, Sex and the City. Together, Tina and Harvey found
another backer in the huge Hearst Corporation, the world’s leading
publisher of monthly magazines. In July 1998, Tina Brown announced the
news on the front page of the New York Times. Recalls New York
Observer media reporter Gabriel Snyder, “It was going to be King
Kong.”
---
Not surprisingly, Tina felt under
tremendous pressure to deliver something spectacular. The magazine world
was watching her every move. Ignoring the trend toward
demographically-driven magazines, she envisioned something along the lines
of the popular, general-interest weekly German magazine Stern,
center-stapled so you could roll it up and stick it in your pocket, with a
newsy sensibility and lots of photos, and, in a rejection of her own
formula for Vanity Fair’s newsstand success, movie stars would be
replaced on the cover by creative designs. Instead of hiring fashion
photographers, Talk would use photos from the news wires. Imagine
an upscale People magazine, done on the cheap.
First thing was to find and poach talent.
In this, Tina proved that she wasn’t just a manipulator of buzz, but also
a victim of it. “If Tina hears someone’s name a few times, she takes that
as a sign there is a reason to talk to them,” recalls Jonathan Mahler, who
had been writing for The Forward, a respected and lively but not
very buzzy Jewish cultural paper, but whose name crossed Tina’s orbit a
few times. Her assistant called and invited him to breakfast – at an
incongruously unglamorous diner near her house on Manhattan’s fancy Sutton
Place. “She was apologetic,” Mahler recalls. It must have been quite a
sight: among the other diners, including seniors in jogging outfits and
punk rockers with grungy hair, sat Tina, perfectly dressed, wearing
sunglasses, reading New Yorker page proofs. “And I was worried
whether I would recognize her. Then I realized how ridiculous that
was.” She impressed him as a good listener, eager to learn from a younger,
perhaps more plugged-in person. He signed on avidly, becoming one of just
four initial staffers.
Tina saw stories as pre-sold productions,
like TV programs, rather than inquiries that would unfold in unexpected
ways. Talk’s premiere issue, September 1999, was high-octane. The
cover featured a power triumvirate for the times, Bush-Clinton-Paltrow.
There was a casual, up-close look at presidential candidate George W. Bush
(which revealed the man uses the “f-word”), an interview with Hillary
Clinton in which she talked for the first time about her husband’s
Lewinsky affair, and, in a nod to serious journalism, a first person
account by the UN’s former Iraq sanctions chief Richard Butler about how
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had undermined weapons inspection efforts.
Then there was Miramax’s synergy thing.
Weinstein was close with the Clintons, Paltrow a Miramax star. One debut
issue Talk story (which was in fact optioned as a movie property by
Miramax’s film division) told of a group of tourists kidnapped and
murdered on a long march through the Ugandan jungle. Heffernan was a
liaison for such efforts. “They called me from the office and
arranged four-way calls with the lawyer,” Heffernan recalls. “And Harvey
Weinstein put in a call to me and said, ‘We’re going to close this fucking
deal tonight!’ What else did I move to New York for? I mean, I’m from a
town of 4000!”
Talk
thrived on a certain kind of
sharp-fanged writing, the best of which was probably the editor’s own
musings in Tina Brown’s Diary, based on the journal she had faithfully
kept since she was a young girl. Some of the material Talk
published was so intentionally provocative that it required a subsequent
dance of contrition. In March 2000, Talk published an angry letter
from Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Nichols and George Segal, a response to
producer Ernest Lehman’s remembrances of working with the three on a 1966
movie, which includes a characterization of Nichols as a drunk. "Do you
ever check anything?” the three demanded. “Do you print strange and sour
attacks on people without giving the targets a chance to comment?"
Talk ended up printing Lehman’s "deep apology for all the pettiness
and inaccuracies made in my diary 35 years ago."
Tina had always been fascinated by the
foibles of the human condition, especially stories about characters whose
lives closely mirrored her own chronic dissatisfaction with herself and
relentless drive to win. Judy Bachrach’s extravagantly detailed and highly
unauthorized portrait, Harry and Tina Come to America, paints a
picture of the daughter of a moderately successful English movie producer
who decided at a tender age that life was about who you knew and who you
screwed and whether people could be made to talk about you. Thanks to a
combination of real intelligence, a sharp eye and a savage pen, a knack
for getting and exploiting good contacts, and a sense of what people want,
Tina moved quickly from a lesser Oxford college onto a path greased by
relationships with powerful men (including an affair with the married,
respected newspaper editor Harold Evans, who would divorce his wife for
her) and through the succession of magazine editorships that would cap out
with Talk.
---
For the real skinny, and because Tina was
not well versed in popular culture, she turned to young editors. Two of
Talk’s earliest employees, Sam Sifton and Jonathan Mahler, were
deputized to get out and find hip writers and happening material. One of
the first scribes they reached out to was Doug Century, who had written a
book on gang culture. Over a meal at the Brooklyn Diner, a theme
restaurant that is actually in Manhattan, they pitched the opportunity to
be a big player with Talk. Century was thrilled. But the whole
thing would later prove emblematic of a fundamental failing of the whole
venture: Tina’s unpredictability. As they would later joke, it was somehow
fitting that the first piece assigned by Talk never ran. When
Century met Weinstein and introduced himself as the author of an extremely
short Talk article on the rapper Queen Latifah, the movie producer,
barked: ‘That was a great piece.’ Tina herself assured Century,
‘You’re a pro stylist.’ But after two of his first four articles had been
killed outright and two others shrunk by more than half, the writer
couldn’t help wondering whether these people really said what they meant,
or meant what they said.
Throughout her career, Tina Brown had
worked hard to light a fire under the publishing industry. Everything had
to be hot, everything was changeable, droppable, up until the last
possible moment. “She’s the editor as entrepreneur rather than editor as
curator,” says Malcolm Gladwell, whom Tina hired to write for The New
Yorker. “She just liked interesting stories.” When Century proposed a
profile of the entertainer “Master P,” Tina had no idea who the man was,
but the idea that there was a 6’4” rapper/record executive with gold teeth
and a net worth exceeding $300 million whose existence had escaped her
seemed impossibly alluring. She wanted the story – in a hurry.
Almost overnight, Century found himself on a jet to New Mexico,
where he switched to a small turboprop, and raced in a rental car to the
movie set, an abandoned prison in Santa Fe, where Master P was filming a
gangsta flick, then wrote the article in a single day. At the last minute,
though, Tina decided to replace Century’s article with a newly discovered
photo of the corpse of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a celebrated poet of the
Russian Revolution.
---
Once the first issue came out, the staff
was ecstatic. Then they realized, with growing horror, that it would be
a tough act to follow. They’d produced a powerful debut, but they
were exhausted. Could they do it all over again, month after month?
Not with the way Tina kept changing her
mind, in a frantic effort to keep everything fresh and new. One young
writer received over $100,000 a year on a retainer. ‘It’s amazing,” she
told another writer—“they pay me whether I write or whether I don’t
write.’ But there was a price. “Tina was notorious for not respecting
anybody’s boundaries, personal or otherwise,” one writer recalls. You had
to be prepared for phone calls from the editor at three in the morning.
“That’s why so many people were unhappy. She expected you to work like a
dog around the clock. On top of it, she treated you like a dog.”
Favorites, those deemed useful or popular
or attractive, found Tina encouraging and responsive. One category she
employed – as she had at the previous magazines – was fixers: people who
knew people, and who could be counted on to help arrange access, to keep
Tina posted on what was new and hot. Most of them didn’t last long, and
weren’t necessarily talented at their poorly defined roles, but they
constituted a who’s who of influence and family: the glamorous wife of a
publishing mogul, the daughter of a billionaire, the wife of a magnate’s
nephew.
Other employees, including some who
worked at Talk for a good part of its short existence, she treated
as nonentities. “My friends in entry-level were just astonished that she
never knew their name,” says Heffernan, “never made eye contact with
them.” People knew not to try to be her friend.
From
the start, Tina had made clear that Talk would not have the
unlimited resources of her former employer Conde Nast, for whom she had
run Vanity Fair and The New Yorker (and run up enormous
losses) before launching her new venture. This would be a different kind
of operation, more egalitarian, kinder and gentler. But for all Tina’s
talk about “thinking outside the box” and the air of a dot-com startup she
cultivated, the pecking order quickly became clear. Staffers who thought
they would enjoy a bit of glamour were told they could attend her soirees
not as guests but as party helpers. Reacting to the news, they cried in
the bathroom. “The people who were putting out the magazine weren’t even
allowed the things that you hoped that you were getting a little bit of
when you went to go work for Tina,” recalls Heffernan, who started as a
researcher-reporter and later served as articles editor. “It’s not a big
salary, it’s not great treatment, but [at least you figure] you get to go
to some of the parties.”
The
pressure was intense, and it showed. The city’s gossip columns, especially
the New York Post’s Page Six, pilloried the magazine. It
seemed that hardly a day went by without some item about discord or
unhappiness or dysfunction.
Tina, a
stickler for proper behavior in others, had different standards for
herself, parading a set of amusing eccentricities that in another staffer
would have been considered intolerable. “Everyone else was quite focused,
but not Tina,” says one former staffer. “She was totally in the clouds, a
weird combination of spacey and manic.” She was forgetful and fuzzy, and
required assistance with basic tasks. She had a driver, not so much
because she wasn’t the type to take the subway, but because she didn’t
know her way around. She’d usually leave something behind when she went to
the bathroom – papers or her lipstick. Because she doesn’t type, her
assistant had to do her email for her. Her column, Tina Brown’s Diary, was
written in longhand.
---
Tina’s
24/7 worrying, which had kept her staffs on their toes at earlier gigs,
now had a greater basis in reality. Her other magazines had all lost money
for most of the years she ran them, but the sponsors of Talk were
not prepared to subsidize it indefinitely, and her abundant public critics
eagerly noted missteps. Subscriptions grew, but from February to April
2000 the magazine sold just 18 percent of the copies sent to
newsstands, a discouraging number for accountants and advertisers alike.
As losses mounted, the company went from profligate to skinflint. In the
spring of 2000, cutbacks were instituted – staffers were no longer
permitted vouchers for private “black cars” to take them home after
late-night work sessions. Colored file folders were banned. Within six
months of its launch, Talk had to be repositioned from King Kong to
underdog. And the magazine would suffer several format changes, affecting
everything from the size of its pages to the quality of its paper, and
would even abandon its vaunted “European” look. Media columnists were
repeatedly assured that the magazine had “just turned the corner.” Tina’s
personal PR efforts often backfired. During one walk-through of the
offices for a filmed television segment, she tried to demonstrate she knew
everyone, but got many, if not most, of the names wrong.
The
changes imposed by deteriorating finances had an unanticipated result.
Instead of competing with People and The New Yorker, the
magazine ended up competing with Vanity Fair. From the
center-stapled early issues, it retreated to the more common
“perfect-binding”; after initially trumpeting its celebrity-free covers,
Talk was soon competing for the same marquee names with the other
glossies and offering blockbuster photo spreads by top photographers. “The
world didn’t need another Vanity Fair,” says New York Observer
media writer Snyder. “Certainly not a second-rate Vanity
Fair.” The best that can be said is that in some months, Talk
outdid its far thicker rival in riffing on the familiar formula of stars,
sex, ideas and politics.
Tina
always had plenty of enemies, and some of the sharks could smell blood in
the water. When she convened an “Innovators and Navigators” conference in
Santa Barbara, featuring a fabulous who’s who of power figures from
Barbara Streisand to Rudy Giuliani, the Financial Times predicted
it would generate lots of “hot air.” Gossip columnists pointedly noted
that top executives of the Hearst Corporation, Talk’s half-owner,
did not attend.
But not everything was going badly for
Tina, who still had remarkable pull in the country she’d left two decades
earlier. In November 2000, she received the Commander of the Order of the
British Empire honor from Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.
---
As
tough as Tina was seen to be, Harvey Weinstein, was a lot tougher, and he
expected results fast. After the first three or four issues, when the
magazine did not rocket to success, Tina seemed to panic. She constantly
asked colleagues and friends for their opinions of cover designs, then
ignored the advice. “She was just grasping at straws,” says one insider.
“She didn’t listen to anyone. She was a strange mixture of very needy and
very arrogant at the same time.” In spring, 2001, she embarked on yet
another of her last-minute cover changes, but this one, widely publicized,
would be seen as confirmation of the magazine’s self-destructive drift.
She had settled on one cover, changed her mind, changed her mind again,
and then, at the last minute, changed it again. The final choice was the
hit Broadway show, The Producers, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick,
which happened to be backed by Weinstein and had already been heavily
covered elsewhere. Media writers began asking if Tina had lost her edge.
By then, after two years of existence, only two of the original top
editors remained, and only 10 of 81 original masthead names.
She
even seemed to lose her sense of what made a good story. On one occasion,
she berated a young editor for proposing a bad idea, literally chastising
him for being “stupid.” A moment later, a celebrity entered, and, as luck
would have it, mentioned the same idea. Tina jumped, issuing instructions
that the story be assigned immediately. “It was the same damn thing that
he had been asking her,” says an incredulous witness. “She was abusive in
that crazy way.”
“A magazine
is nothing other than good stories and good writing, but she seemed to be
looking for something else,” recalls Daisy Garnett, a writer from England
who signed on in the early days but left because she wanted to do meatier
work. “She was looking for the ultimate celebrity who would say they were
gay and be photographed nude on the cover.” In service of that principle,
Tina pushed the limits. When Garnett interviewed the wild actress Bijou
Phillips, the young woman became indiscreetly candid. “She told me all
this stuff on the record, about losing her virginity to
Evan Dando, about having a three-way. It was a good story in terms of what
Tina wanted in a fluffy piece with pictures about a young ‘it girl.’ Most
of those stories are disappointing because people know not to tell you
those things. But Tina used the stuff and I kind of regretted it. You
can’t get that kind of buzz all the time..”
Tina
frequently took her own frustration out on others. She yelled a lot. Once,
she chastised Heffernan for killing a piece by Newt Gingrich without
asking her first. “She accused me of taking a ‘clinical approach to
writers who actually have feelings’,” recalls Heffernan with incredulity.
“It was a pretty bad day if Tina was lecturing me on the feelings of
writers.”
In its 30 months lifespan, the
magazine’s staff turned over roughly five times. “The younger people that
worked there as the assistants—I always felt bad, because so many of them
just seemed so put upon, overwhelmed and just miserable,” says one writer.
“I mean, the best times I had at Talk were people’s going away parties.”
Tina
brought in some white knights to fix things, but most left in fairly quick
succession. None was more highly touted than Maer Roshan, who had been a
top editor at New York Magazine and had developed a reputation for
killer promotions. Roshan, an assiduous self-promoter, thought this was
his big break – a chance to be the second-coming of Vanity Fair’s
powerful editor, Graydon Carter. He would save the place with his knack
for packaging and promotion. While hard-working grunts like associate
editors were said to receive salaries of $40,000, Roshan reportedly
received a handsome $300,000.
“Tina was rattled and insecure and happy
to turn it over to him,” recalls one staffer. “In truth he is more
like the way people thought she was.” Tina, meanwhile, was still
working the synergy, which was what Talk was supposed to be all
about. There were conferences in sunny climes, book deals, a web site.
----
Tina Brown and her colleagues have laid
the blame for Talk’s failure on the events of September 11 and on
the nation’s faltering economy. They may be right about Sept 11,
but the cause was not a changed public sensibility, but the way the
magazine handled the event.
On September 7, the staff was going
through another tough close. When the attack took place, staffers
scrambled to redo the issue, finishing the grueling retool in record time.
Maer Roshan went home to celebrate the Jewish high holy days with his
family on Long Island, but he did not get much of a chance to relax. As he
was beginning to unwind, his assistant phoned with alarming news: Harvey
Weinstein and his wife had gotten their hands on the page proofs, and did
not like what they saw. “I think you ought to know,” the assistant said,
“Harvey’s in here tearing up the magazine with Tina.”
For some time, rumors had circulated that
Hearst, one of the magazine’s two financial backers, was losing patience
with the effort. Roshan had been given assurance that he would run the
magazine, but now, with the enterprise’s future more than ever in
Weinstein’s hands, Tina wasn’t about to challenge her money man. Roshan
rushed back from Long Island, and threw a fit. He got the close date
pushed back, and the issue finally closed three weeks late. But Harvey
Weinstein’s order that Rudy Giuliani appear on the cover, which was not
Roshan’s choice, prevailed.
Miramax’s TriBeCa offices had been
damaged in the World Trade Center attack, and Weinstein was using Talk’s
Chelsea offices. His attention was both a curse and a blessing. He made
the editors miserable and undermined staff morale, but it was also nice to
see that the underwriter cared enough to get involved. Some staffers hoped
this would be enough to save the magazine. But Weinstein was also losing
patience. In late September, he was infuriated that, a week before it was
to go to the printers, the November issue was not ready for him to see due
to last minute editorial changes. "I don't understand why you can't get
this magazine together," he yelled at Tina and Galotti, in
front of other staff. "I don't know what you're smirking at. I could run
this magazine better than the two of you."
Certainly, the weak economy hurt the
magazine. The October 2001 issue had 9.2 percent fewer pages of
advertising than a year earlier. But while revenue was down 4 percent
from the previous October, it still showed gains on a year-to-year basis.
Nevertheless, the magazine was losing money. According to an article in
the New York Daily News, in total, the magazine had lost more than
$50 million. Word surfaced that Cathleen Black, the tough president of
Hearst magazines, was tired of pouring in money. Tina and Galotti began
making the rounds of other prospective backers.
---
It is perhaps fitting that, given the
pivotal role of parties in Tina Brown’s career and in the public’s
perception of her, the magazine that she launched with a grand party
should, unintentionally end with one. After planning a big L.A. bash in
honor of the 2001 Golden Globe Awards, Tina had begun to worry that it
might not be a good idea: both the economy and the population were still
reeling from the effects of September 11. But when the report about
Talk’s mammoth losses came out, she realized that to cancel the party
would send out a distress signal that could very well prove fatal. The
festivities went ahead.
On the night of the Golden Globes bash,
Tina got a call from Frank Bennack, Hearst’s chairman, who had been a huge
supporter of the magazine. He had been trying to find a financial fix, one
that would allow Hearst to bring in a replacement investor yet still stay
involved somehow. But he was retiring, and his successor didn’t share his
warm feelings for Tina and Talk.. Bennack gave Tina an unwelcome
scoop: Harvey Weinstein was closing the magazine down.
Tina, stunned, wiped away the tears and
marched stoically to greet her celebrity guests. She proceeded with the
party as if nothing was amiss, then got on a plane for a red-eye flight to
New York. Meanwhile, Ron Galotti’s assistant sent out a company-wide email
to announce a mandatory meeting for the next day, Friday at 5 pm.
Employees had heard that Galotti might be leaving to return to Conde Nast,
and that’s what many expected the meeting to be about. But Matt Drudge
sensed something bigger was going on. At 4 pm, he put up the headline,
“EXCLUSIVE: TINA'S TALK HALTS PUBLICATION; PLUG PULLED ON MONTHLY.”
Once the decision was made to end it all,
the spigot closed quickly. Staff were given minimal severance. Writers on
assignment were told to stop; in some cases they were not paid. [Full
disclosure statement: I was given one assignment by Talk, a
4000-word feature, and was in France working on it when the magazine’s
owners decided to fold the publication. I have not been paid for my work.]
Tina made out fine, retaining her title (at a reported million-dollar
salary) as chief of Talk/Miramax Books, which had successfully engineered
a number of book deals.
She also went on a new PR offensive, with
the aim of bolstering her own reputation. She noted that circulation had
been growing. Indeed, including subscribers and newsstand sales,
circulation in the second half of 2001 was up 16 percent over the previous
year, to 720,000, quite a respectable figure.
Her
triumphant tenure in the 1980s at Vanity Fair, whose readership was
70 percent female, suggests that she might have been the right person to
run a smart women’s magazine. Her passion for the new in the news might
have brought her success at a weekly –her original vision of Talk--or
even a daily. “She should be running the New York Post,” says one
former staffer.
In the end, the failure of Talk
represented a kind of rebuke to the trendiest aspects of magazine
publishing during the Tina Brown era. The last issue is a fair measure
of the product. It had articles on perennial bad boy Sean Penn and the
cross-dressing real estate heir and accused murderer Robert Durst, Chiara
Mastroianini [daughter of Catherine Deneuve and the Italian director]
“opening up on lesbianism, fashion, and the end of her affair with Benicio
del Toro”, and a luscious photo spread of silicon-enhanced model-actresses
cavorting for the troops in Afghanistan. There were also pieces on Dan
Rather’s sensitive side, on the Oscars as a great terrorism target, and on
Benazir Bhutto’s planned return to Pakistan. The columnist Jimmy Breslin,
famous for blunt assessments, summed it up this way: “Tina Brown… put out
a dishonest magazine. One of her partners was Miramax, the film
company, and she had stories and photos about their stars and movies. She
regarded the public as suckers who would put up with being taken. She had
a word, ‘buzz,’ which she proclaimed as the proof that a story is great.
There is no story with anything new in it. There is just the party. Then
call it journalism."
Tina had lived by the buzz, now she was
destined to die by it. She loved publicity, but seemed to hate the way the
media tracked her less-successful efforts. And despite abundant
protestations that Tina didn’t deserve so much attention, hundreds of
articles followed Talk from rise to demise. “This sort of White
Whale-ish obsession with her, she didn’t ask for it, although in some
respects she certainly brought it on herself,” says Mahler. Like a White
Whale, Tina Brown may submerge for a while, but don’t bet that she will
stay down long.
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