So long the toast of New York's chic media set, Tina Brown is now dismissed simply as toast. Conor O'Clery records a fall
In her diary column in the last edition of Talk, editor Tina Brown described going to a party in Manhattan where "a glossy magazine editor works the room, intent on scaring up a new publishing partner". It's not clear if glossy applies to magazine or editor (could be both) but it is obvious this is Ms Brown herself, trying to find someone to bail out her monthly journal as Hearst and Miramax prepared to pull the plug after losses of $50 million.
When Talk magazine finally folded on January 18th, the British editor who for so long was the toast of the town was gleefully dismissed as toast by her critics. This is nothing new to her. "I have been swimming in a howling sea of schadenfreude for the past three years. I am used to it," she told the New York Times. "Any great long career has at least one flameout in it."
It wasn't so much schadenfreude - the "secret, shameful thrill some people get from others' misfortune" - which was on display in the backbiting publishing world of Manhattan this week. Rather there was considerable public satisfaction at the downfall of the one-time Tatler editor who came to America and resuscitated Vanity Fair and made the New Yorker more readable.
Ms Brown and her husband Harold Evans, a former Sunday Times editor, became the talk of the town, holding fancy parties in their Manhattan apartment.
She made and broke literary and journalistic reputations, paying legendary commissions. She often charmed people and then dropped them. Her former wine critic told me Tina Brown pursued him for months to write a column for Vanity Fair. He thought she was a wonderful editor and left the magazine when she did.
"Tina Brown could be totally disarming, then suddenly clap her hands and say 'OK! That's it! Out!" recalled Andrew Stephen, the New Statesman's US editor, who once came out of her office with blood trickling from a shaving cut, whereupon her secretary cried: "My God! Did Tina do that?"
Many of her enemies happily contributed to Tina and Harry Come to America, a high-class hatchet job by journalist Judy Bachrach, who said in the book that the couple who epitomised "parvenue royalty" shaped "every aspect of the American publishing world - until it inevitably turned on them".
Columnist Jimmy Breslin was particularly vitriolic. American publishers liked hiring Brits as editors, he wrote in Newsday, but "underneath the lovely accent were large swatches of horrible taste (and) outright illiteracy". Another Brit editor, Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic, criticised Ms Brown for her "crazed cult of contemporaneity" and lack of guiding principle.
He recalled in the Wall Street Journal how Tina once asked him to write about "anything that's hot right now in religion". "Hot" was one of her favourite words; the other was "buzz". Time magazine had fun with that, ending an article about Talk with the mocking refrain, "ashes to ashes, buzz to bust".
The buzz was never louder than at a champagne party at the Statue of Liberty for the launch of Talk in August 1999. The first issue had 170 pages of ads and an exclusive interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton. However, the formula which increased the circulation of Vanity Fair from 400,000 to 1.2 million failed her at Talk, which never achieved the "must-buy" quality of her previous triumphs.
Talk got a reputation for high staff turnover and hectic last-minute changes. Celebrity columnists like George Stephanopolous came and went. Cover subjects included the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who hadn't had a hit movie for years. It was unfailingly laudatory of Hollywood actors as it attempted a synergy with Miramax studios which never really worked.
After a few issues, the Boston Globe wrote it off, saying "nobody is talking about Talk". It wasn't that it lacked substance, as Andrew Sullivan maintained, rather it lost its way in the post-Clinton, post-boom Bush-era America. More significantly, it lost precious advertising. By February last year Talk was down to 44 full ad pages. This February there are 20 and one is a "house ad" for Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of the venture which is flourishing and where Tina Brown will stay as chairman.
The final Talk party was in Los Angeles for the Golden Globe awards. Ms Brown again worked the room and ended up in conversation with Michael Eisner, head of the Walt Disney Company of which Miramax is a subsidiary, but he couldn't be "scared up" even to get the almost-ready March issue published.
Contrary to reports that she will now publish her intimate diaries, which might make some of Ms Bachrach's gleeful readers tremble a little, Ms Brown told the New York Observer she thought not. "Maybe when I'm 75," she said, "when the bailiffs are taking my furniture out, I'll cash in then."