NEW YORK — The New Yorker would have spun this story slowly, allowing its intricately interwoven themes of hubris and cultural entropy to emerge in a subtle six-part series.
Vanity Fair would have blurted it out like a high concept movie-of-the-week.
Or better yet, a new sitcom.
Here's the pitch: Hip and headstrong editor Tina Brown runs Vanity Fair, a smashingly successful magazine that dishes glitz, fame and glamour-- biff-bam-boom!
The New Yorker is Vanity Fair's antithesis: quiet, refined and disdainful of the corrupting pop cultural fray.
So when media mogul S. I. Newhouse persuades the very British Brown to leave Vanity Fair and take over America's snootiest weekly, the stage is set for personality conflict, culture clash and a classic war of wills.
Boffo boob-tube, right?
Yeah . . . well . . . there are a couple small problems.
For one, a recent tour of the legendary New Yorker offices suggests that the institution may not have been quite as entrenched in tradition as some purists pretend.
And Brown doesn't entirely fit her typecast.
Which is not to say that the Brown-New Yorker merger isn't a ripping good yarn.
By the six-month anniversary of her arrival at the magazine, in fact, Brown was receiving more press attention than that other blonde Vanity Fair gave mainstream cachet in the 1980s: Madonna.
And, in some circles, stirring more debate.
Brown's admirers tend to exhibit all the restraint of the Vancouver Sun columnist who gushed, "Her name is Tina Brown and I think I love her." They call her the salvation of an increasingly lackluster relic.
Her detractors assert equal and opposite force.
As New Yorker veteran Garrison Keillor, who declined to work with Brown, told the Columbia Journalism Review: "I left because I love the New Yorker and because she is the wrong person to edit it. . . . Ms. Brown, like so many Brits, seems most fascinated by the passing carnival and celebrity show in America. . . . She has redesigned it into a magazine that looks and reads an awful lot like a hundred other magazines."
To Brown's way of thinking, Brown-bashers are simplistic at best, sexist at worst. And star-struck Tina-philes miss the point.
Folks figured they'd gleaned her one true self from the pages of Vanity Fair, she says. And then they fretted, "Would this thing they had decided was me be in the New Yorker?"
"One reason I did the New Yorker," she says in a lickety-split British lilt that remains soft-edged even when her blue eyes spark, "was to prove that I'm an editor that can do many kinds of publications."
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In an analysis in last month's Columbia Journalism Review, Eric Utne, editor of the Utne Reader, laments that Brown has essentially remade the New Yorker into Vanity Fair's image: a "weekly epistle for America's new orthodoxy--the cult of personality."
Cynics see Brown as the Madonna of magazinedom, and figure she'll soon have Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker's monocled mascot, in bondage.
Brown is not particularly amused, nor annoyed, by a comparison between herself and the fame- and power-hungry material girl.
"I don't like Madonna particularly . . . " Brown says, as she sits in her large office on the 17th floor of the New Yorker's 20 W. 43rd St. address.
"I mean, she's fine. (But) she was just something to sell magazines. That's what she was doing in Vanity Fair. . . . I don't feel a particular need to write about her any more."
Nor, Brown says politely, does she think anyone need waste more ink writing about "Tina Brown and her life and times."
Protests aside, her life is at least as interesting as most Vanity Fair profiles.
Brown, 39, was born in Buckinghamshire, England. Her father produced movies, including the Agatha Christie mystery films, and her mother was Sir Laurence Olivier's personal assistant.
Brown managed to get herself expelled from boarding school, she says, by writing a play that featured some "iconoclastic" jokes about the headmistress. That small setback aside, she received her MA in English from Oxford University's St. Anne's College, where she wrote for the campus magazine and authored plays.
In 1974, Brown wrote a series of articles about the American women's movement for the London Times. Harold Evans, the Times' editor, took notice. In 1981, Brown and Evans married at the home of writer Sally Quinn and her husband, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Evans and Brown have two children, George, 7, and Isabelle, 2.
Rupert Murdoch bought the Times in early 1981 and fired Evans, who went on to become editorial director of U.S. News & World Report and now is president and publisher of another Newhouse property, Random House Books.
From 1979 to 1983, Brown edited a British society magazine called "The Tatler." When Newhouse, owner of the Conde Nast publishing empire, bought that publication, he also decided to revive America's Vanity Fair. He brought Brown on as an adviser.
