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The New Yorker Radio Hour

Tina Brown on Vanity Fair, the Eighties, and Harvey Weinstein

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.26.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tina Brown is a legend in New York publishing. She was barely thirty years old when she was recruited from London to take over a foundering Vanity Fair. Take over she did, becoming one of the power centers of New York culture by bringing together the intellectual world and the celebrity world of entertainment. She later brought enormous change to The New Yorker (including, for the first time, photographs); she launched Talk magazine with Harvey Weinstein; and she helped launch the Daily Beast. Her new book, “The Vanity Fair Diaries, 1983-1992” is a kind of coming-of-age story about a pre-Internet era of unruffled ambition, unlimited budgets, big shoulders, big hair, and fabulous parties. Tina Brown tells David Remnick that her experience with Weinstein, as unpleasant as it was—she found the mogul “bullying [and] duplicitous,” profane and erratic—did not prepare her for the revelations of brutality and intimidation that have been published in The New Yorker and elsewhere. The experience has shaken her. “I have friends who’ve been accused of things who I want instinctively to defend, but I’ve held back,” Brown says. “Because I don’t know what’s coming next. The truth is, you realize you don’t really know anybody.” Plus, the cartoonist Emily Flake on the joys of Rudy’s Bar, where the combo of a shot and a beer costs five bucks. The sense of history and ritual, and the troubles confessed across generations, remind her of church—but at church, Flake points out, “they’re not going to let you sit around for six hours and drink.”

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is a real trait to bond.

0:03.0

The one world observatory is straight of the block for West Boulevard and make that right.

0:09.0

I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy.

0:14.0

And also I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there.

0:19.0

This really subversive, strange thing, in rap especially,

0:22.5

and see what their lives are like other sites in the world.

0:26.7

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

0:32.1

This looks like, you know, a nightclub in the 80s, actually.

0:35.5

It feels like Studio 54. Where are we going?

0:39.3

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Tina Brown. My friend and predecessor at The New Yorker

0:45.2

is a legend in magazine publishing and a force of nature in the very best way.

0:49.7

Hello. I'm just saying this looks like a Schreger hotel around here. I mean, where's my lunch

0:54.1

reservation?

0:54.6

Hello, how are you?

0:55.4

Tina Brown.

0:56.8

Brown came to the United States in 1983 to take over Vanity Fair magazine.

1:02.1

She'd been running the small but influential British magazine,

1:06.0

gossipy thing called Tatler.

1:08.3

And very quickly, at Vanity Fair,

1:10.5

she somehow caught the American zeitgeist of the 80s.

1:13.6

She mixed glamour and celebrities in glossy photography, with serious reporting, an intellectual

1:19.5

heft in a winning formula that made Vanity Fair a must read. Later, Brown went on to edit The New Yorker

...

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