. .
[According to the writer, The New York Post
was planning to run this story but killed it
when Tina Brown unexpectedly granted the
paper an interview at the last minute.
Editors at The Post felt that to run this
piece as well would have constituted
overkill.]
.
Is Tina Brown the Worst Boss in New York?
By Toby Young
If you happened to be among the select 800
invited to the launch party for Talk last
night, and you saw a group of people who
looked as though they'd just returned from a
war zone, don't be alarmed. It was only the
magazine's staff. Indeed, if they resembled
battle-hardened veterans they're probably
well on their way to recovery by now.
Compared to working for Tina Brown, a tour
of duty in Kosovo is a walk in the park.
"It was an extreme amount of work and we
bonded like veterans in a foxhole," says one
staff member. "This was a crazy close,
there's no doubt about that."
Among the casualties was Sam Sifton, an
editor who left The New York Press for Talk
last year. On Thursday, July 16, a day
before the magazine closed, he suffered from
a severe bout of nausea and spent much of
the afternoon in the bathroom. "An entirely
appropriate response," muttered one
disillusioned Talk contributor.
Of course, Sifton wouldn't comment about
this.
"Don't ...don't know...don't know what
you're talking about," spluttered Sifton
when contacted earlier this week. "Don't
know, don't know, don't know. Sorry man."
Click. Dialtone.
One reason for his reticence may be that
everyone connected with Talk has had to sign
a confidentiality agreement. (A better name
for the magazine might be Omerta.) That's an
unusual request for an editor to make but
Tina has a long tradition of making unusual
demands of her staff. There was a famous
incident at Vanity Fair when she instructed
her then assistant, Brenda Phipps, to get
"Kim" on the phone. She meant Kim Meehan, a
stylist in the fashion department, but her
assistant put her through to Kim Heron, a
senior editor, by mistake.
"Kim," Tina barked, "I need a new bra."
"I was in the middle of editing something,"
remembers Kim Heron, now the editor-in-chief
of Wired. "I think I said, 'What?' and then
she kind of repeated it and I said, 'Tina,
this is Kim Heron,' and then we both burst
out laughing."
To those accustomed to working for Tina, the
long hours Talk's staff had to put in came
as no surprise. "I remember that for one
stretch of four months I was never home
before the end of the eleven o'clock news,"
recalls New York Times Book Review editor
Chip McGrath, who served for a time as the
deputy editor of The New Yorker. "It was
insane at times but it was also exciting."
Tina's normal method of editing a magazine
is to commission far more material than she
needs, then postpone the decision about what
to include in the final mix until the very
last moment. For her writers and editors,
this naturally causes a great deal of
stress. At Talk, however, the problem was
exacerbated by the fact that she didn't have
any trusted consiglieries whom she could
seek advice from.
"She was going round and round in circles,
spiralling out of control," says one
insider. "A piece would be in, then it would
be out, then it would be back in again. She
couldn't make up her mind about anything."
At the suggestion of Howard Lally, Talk's
Managing Editor, she brought in Micahel
Caruso, the former editor-in-chief of
Details, to lend a hand. However, the
problems persisted.
"She was still tinkering with the mix right
up to the wire," confides one Talk writer.
"As recently as two weeks before closing
they hadn't decided what was going to be in
the magazine."
According to this writer, the chaotic
atmosphere in the office meant none of the
editors knew what the others were doing. "It
was like the White House or something," he
says. "Everything was incredibly
compartmentalised. People were operating in
exclusive cells."
The fact that the 47-year-old Brit suffers
from "persecution mania," in the words of
one insider, didn't help. Last June, she
threw a staff party at her $3.7m town house
at which she gave a strange speech. It was
meant to boost morale but it left many
people scratching their heads.
"She said something like, 'We're about to
begin the summer from hell and there will be
all these naysayers and critics who don't
understand what we're trying to do,'"
recalls one person who was present. "There
was a real kind of defensiveness and
paranoia." He went on to compare Talk's
offices to the sinister partnership at the
centre of The Firm, John Grisham's legal
thriller. "I just wanted out," he says.
Tina Brown is in the unusual position of
being an editor who doesn't really like
journalists. They're troublesome and
untrustworthy and, according to a close
associate of hers, if she could dispense
with them altogether she would. One New
Yorker writer actually went so far as to say
she hates them.
"I once heard her screaming, 'They want to
be fucking artists and I want them to be
reporters.' In fact, they just wanted to be
writers and she just wanted them to be
obedient."
However, according to another colleague from
her New Yorker days, the members of her
staff who suffer the most are those in the
art department.
"Tina is her own art director and is
spectacularly abusive of people in the
visual department who work for her," he
says, "I mean really quite shocking. Yelling
at them, abusive language, you know, 'This
is fucking dull, this is fucking boring,
what's wrong with you? Go get me something.
I want it in four hours, I want it in two
hours, I want it in thirty minutes, I want
it now.' That kind of stuff."
Indeed, Tina mistreated her staff at The New
Yorker so badly, one editor was shocked to
see people crying when she left last year.
"They were suffering from Stockholm
Syndrome," jokes Daniel Menaker, who served
as her Fiction Editor from 1992-94 and is
now the Senior Literary Editor at Random
House. "They had begun to love their captor.
They were grieving at the departure of their
tormentor."
Not everyone on Talk's staff will have met
the boss yet. One long-standing minion of
Tina's recalls that on her first day at work
at Vanity Fair there was an impromptu
leaving party for someone who'd been at the
magazine for years. "When she found out they
were throwing a party for her she said,
'Does this mean I'll finally get to meet
Tina Brown?'"
Of course, working for the most famous
magazine editor in the world does have its
compensations. John Heilpern, now the
theatre critic of The New York Observer but
once a commissioning editor at Vanity Fair,
has been dining out on the following story
for years.
In 1985 Tina asked him to commission a short
story for the Christmas issue and he managed
to persuade Isaac Bashevis Singer to write
one. He turned it in and a few days later it
came back to him with the words "Beef it up
Singer" scrawled on the bottom in big red
letters.
"I had to gently explain to Tina," laughs
Heilpern, "that 'Beef it up Singer' was a
recipient of the Nobel Prize for
Literature."
- ENDS -
Return to MediaGossip.com
___________________________________________________________ ARE YOU A FREELANCE WRITER? Then you should be a member of the NATIONAL WRITERS UNION! The only labor union committed to improving the economic and working conditions of all freelance writers. For more information visit our web site <http://www.nwu.org>, call (212) 254-0279, or email <nwu at nwu.org>.