Saturday, May 17, 2008
Has Tina Brown rescued the New Yorker -- or ruined it?
Jun 26, 1997 | "the rumor mill is totally out of hand ... It's all mad hackdom run amok!" That's what New Yorker editor Tina Brown told the gossip columnist Liz Smith recently, brushing aside whispers that she and her husband, Random House publisher Harry Evans, would soon be fleeing New York for London. (Evans was reportedly eyeing a post in Tony Blair's Labor government.) As if to seal the matter, the couple have put their money where Brown's mouth is: The New York Observer reported last week that the pair paid nearly $4 million for a glitzy new Upper East Side apartment that includes "a library, six baths and three maid's rooms." "Teenandharry," as they are sometimes referred to here, appear to be staying put.
And why not? Brown is finally enjoying herself at the New Yorker, she told Smith, "now that the dragons have been slain and I am surrounded by talents like David Remnick and Joe Klein and Adam Gopnik." This is an interesting comment -- and not merely because Joe Klein and Adam Gopnik aren't necessarily the first names that pop into one's head when contemplating the glories of the New Yorker circa 1997. It is an interesting comment because it makes you pause to wonder: What dragons, exactly, is Tina Brown proud of having put to death?
Brown is surely referring, at least in part, to the petrified mummies she has driven from the magazine's editorial staff. (The New Yorker is famous for its tenured ghosts, the lit-world Boo Radleys who lurk in corners decades past their prime.) She is also probably talking about gifted writers such as Ian Frazier and Jamaica Kincaid, who never bothered to hide their loyalty to the earlier William Shawn (1952-1987) and Robert Gottlieb (1987-1992) regimes. Frazier and Kincaid have spit plenty of fire since quitting the magazine; in an interview with Salon last year, among many others, Kincaid called Brown a vulgarian who has turned the New Yorker into "a version of People magazine."
For longtime readers of the New Yorker, however, Brown's remarks resonate on a more metaphorical level. The only dragons that have been slain, her admirers argue, are the snobbery, pretension and profound self-indulgence that marked the magazine under her predecessors. (No more 25,000-word articles about soybeans! No more coy phrasings -- "A friend writes," "We've always felt" -- in Talk of the Town! Fewer autumnal Ann Beattie short stories!) Her detractors lament that Brown has cold-bloodedly spiked whatever commitment the magazine has traditionally had to thoroughness, modesty and non-topicality. (Shirtless photos of Kato Kaelin? Roseanne as editorial consultant? Ken Auletta?) Depending on whom you ask, Brown is either her generation's most adroit zeitgeist surfer or the lead zombie in a highbrow remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." There's not a lot of middle ground.
It has been almost five years since Brown leapt from her perch as editor of Vanity Fair to take control of the New Yorker, the world's most venerated magazine -- enough time for her to have left her mark on nearly every aspect of the journal Harold Ross founded in 1925. And it is probably time to tear a question from the mouth of another publicity-minded New Yorker, former Mayor Ed Koch: How is she doing? The business report -- to use a measure beloved by Brown herself -- has been mixed. The magazine has yet to turn a profit under her editorship, although the New York Times reported last fall that subscriptions are up nearly 40 percent, to more than 860,000. Yet Brown has succeeded brilliantly at what has always seemed to be her primary mission: creating an almost deafening weekly buzz around the magazine. "She has made the New Yorker hot, hot, hot," says Forbes FYI editor and New Yorker humor writer Christopher Buckley. "To borrow what one might call a barnyard epithet, she has put together a fucking great magazine. People read it, and they talk about it."
America's chattering classes may talk about the New Yorker almost as obsessively as the rest of the country talks about movies, but God help the journalist who tries to get anyone in the media industry to talk about it on the record. It is perhaps the surest measure of Brown's enormous clout in the publishing world that even the most established writers are terrified -- absolutely terrified -- of offending her in even the slightest, most glancing way.
"My God, man, are you crazy?" one internationally known journalist said to me (he hasn't published in the New Yorker, yet) when I called with a few questions about the magazine. "If I told you what I really want to tell you, I'd be cutting off my nose to spite my face." A normally loquacious social critic was suddenly "too busy" to talk. A book critic at a national magazine wiggled off the hook by claiming, implausibly, that he "didn't read" the magazine. A perfectly pleasant interview with Christopher Buckley -- who proclaimed himself "a master of the suck-up" and then gracefully proved that assertion -- took a tailspin when I asked, toward the end of our talk, if there was anything about the current incarnation of the magazine that he did not love. Buckley paused for what seemed like an eternity. Then he chortled and said: "My friend, do not bullshit the bullshitter."
One frequent New Yorker contributor explained the pervasive Fear of Tina in these terms: "Appearing in this magazine can literally turn your career around. My book editor told me, point blank, that the fact that I wrote for the New Yorker was the deal clincher for her publishing house. It got me my book contract. It's really that childish." Will Blythe, formerly the fiction editor for Esquire, put it a little differently: "The New Yorker brings out the grade-grubbing schoolboy in almost every writer. Everyone -- even people you think would be well above it -- wants that gold star."
Whether everyone in the literary and journalism worlds believes that Tina Brown herself deserves a gold star, however, is another matter altogether.
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