Book Review: Nearly Neighbours

We know, some of us, that Tina Brown, the British former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker had blonde ambition, that “I can do this” certainty that meant she just had to replace Leo Lerman - her 75-year-old predecessor at VF - when she was 30. But she has another powerful motive, one that explains the extraordinary depth of conversation she records in her diaries and the wonderful details of faces, clothes and interiors. (Her account of Jackie Onassis as a social performance - “I felt if you cleared the room and left her alone she'd be in front of the mirror screaming” - is quite brilliant.) She has “observational greed” and that's what drives this book.

I'm riveted throughout Tina Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries. Riveted when I'm irritated, still riveted when she's describing events - there are masses of “events” here - that must have been achingly boring to sit through. But then that could be because - as far as the exotic milieu of this book is concerned at least - I'm not a real person. I started my writing life on an epically snobby London “society and fashion” glossy. I wrote about tribes and trends then, in parallel with Tina Brown's timelines here; I have 80s form. I'm the Metropolitan Liberal Elite, full-on (d'you want to make something of it?).

And - full disclosure - it's worse. I knew Tina Brown slightly. Her first big magazine success was reviving Tatler, as a competitor to Harpers and Queen, where I was the ineffably 80s-titled “style editor”. Brown says Tatler aimed to “own” the Princess Diana story then, but so did we at H&Q. Diana was the cover model and huge booster of the Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, the UK best-seller that Ann Barr (deputy editor of H&Q) and I wrote in 1982. I wrote a bit for Brown at Vanity Fair and wanted to write more, it was terribly well paid by little British standards and a marvellous showcase.

I even, as the book confirms, lived up the road from her in New York, on East 57th Street, on the edge of the Upper East Side. Trump Tower was a few blocks down, on the corner with Fifth Avenue. Trump incidentally is a running theme in these diaries, with a mass of jaw-dropping observations (culminating in the party where Trump pours wine down VF reporter Marie Brenner's dress - juvenile revenge for her rather acute feature on him!).

I knew Brown's core British team at Tatler, some of whom transferred to New York to become her core team there. I'm so not a “civilian” - to use Liz Hurley's marvellous word for people outside her world of glamour warriors - that I wonder how all this could interest people who are. A civilian friend in his 20s tells me he's never heard of Tina Brown. So he certainly won't have heard of 99 per cent of the Manhattan 1980s Big, New-money People Tina Brown meets here practically every day at black-tie benefits, intimate dinner parties for 20, chic ladies-who-lunch places with oppressive maître d's who rule the restaurants.

Many of these people are dead, many have lost it - the money, the looks and the star power. When the book gets going in the early/mid 80s - there's a late 70s prequel and a 90s overlap - Tina Brown was about 30, and often the youngest diner at those top tables.

Not only that, but the world she describes is in painful meltdown. “Mainstream” or “legacy” media were rich with advertising money in the 80s and the editors of great newspapers and magazines were gods. Hot “new media” meant aggressive TV, film and print conglomerates such as Disney, Time Warner or Newscorp. The titans of Silicon Valley - Microsoft aside - hadn't been invented. Thirty years later they'd dwarfed “legacy” media players and defunded them by taking all that advertising away. FAMGA ^* rules.

Everyone's still saying that content is king - and Tina Brown was a genius at creating what she calls “the mix” of content - but technology and new platforms are what create extraordinary new-new money now. And, in a fascinating reversal, some of the most potent platforms are in denial about being “media” at all. They're just geeky enablers, they say, not editors. Don't look at us, nothing to see here.

There are two key themes in Tina Brown's work and life here. There is the push-pull between popular and high culture, the stuff you enjoy and the stuff you feel you ought to have. The back-stories of TV soaps and big essays from literary novelists. Tina Brown is part of a first baby-boomer generation of Oxbridge graduates who are comfortably across the great popular culture themes and stars. She knows how to serve them up in a chic insider way for a “smart” readership. And she knows how to make West Village polo-neck intellectuals look sexy. It's all in the mix. She was good at casting famous names for unexpected assignments. And at talent-spotting, she's always finding clever kids who go on to make it (and spotting characters too: in July 1986 she concludes that the 22-year-old Boris Johnson “is an epic shit. I hope he ends badly”). And all in the great medium of “the buzz” (Brown hated the word) the sheer levelling excitement of new 80s success, money and fame, Party-parity. If you're invited in.

And as an early NY-LON - Brown calls herself a citizen of TransAtlantica - she's forever playing on the difference between the two great cities (this is decades before London became the global rich's favourite city; Flight Capital Heaven).

In England she's always noticing how annoyingly small, slow and unshiny things are. In a big London memorial service she sees the pooh-bahs of the British establishment all seem to have hair in their ears and nostrils. She misses the moronic inferno (the book-title coinage of her Oxford boyfriend Martin Amis) of New York. The vulgar energy, the full-on ambition. But in America she's deliciously appalled by the continuous present everyone seems to live in. She's partial to a nice slab of Cotswold honey-coloured stone and a bit of clever, nuanced posh. But she's made her bed and it's on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Meanwhile the show's moved on - way downtown, past the Village to SoHo and beyond. The inheritors would rather have a spectacular loft than a 10-bedroom apartment with imported French panelling.

Peter York is a Close observer of culture and style, management consultant, author and broadcaster.