'The Vanity Fair Diaries'

“Tina Brown is a modern Becky Sharp – bouncy, ambitious, calculating and ruthless: That’s Roger Louis, The Times of London. I don’t know how you get The New Yorker and The New York Times to rave, but you did,” said Tammy Haddad when introducing Tina at The Jefferson Hotel in honor of her new book The Vanity Fair Diaries. “The Diary is the perfect stocking filler for any social x-ray and for anyone who yearns to wallow in nostalgia. But even students of our time will find the presence of Brown’s observations a source of amusement. The decade’s greatest symbol she observes, turns out to be not a person but a building, Trump Tower. Okay, we have to start there.”

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Book synopsis: “Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood. The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 – 1992 is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Condé Nast’s troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet’s slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company. She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding. In the face of rampant skepticism, she triumphantly reinvents a failing magazine. Here are the inside stories of Vanity Fair scoops and covers that sold millions―the Reagan kiss, the meltdown of Princess Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles, the sensational Annie Leibovitz cover of a gloriously pregnant, naked Demi Moore. In the diary’s cinematic pages, the drama, the comedy, and the struggle of running an “it” magazine come to life. Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries is also a woman’s journey, of making a home in a new country and of the deep bonds with her husband, their prematurely born son, and their daughter. Astute, open-hearted, often riotously funny, Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries is a compulsively fascinating and intimate chronicle of a woman’s life in a glittering era.” Publisher