YouSaid · the spoken record

Tina Brown

lines on the record: 153
first: 2017-11-20
most recent: 2017-11-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A few people I've met who have had the negative and the positive. They have not been upset. They felt it was what it was.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I mean, at one point I say about Syne Newhouse, you know, he has no balls at all, you know, but right, that wasn't always true at all about Symbol, I wouldn't say that my epitaph of Si is he has no balls at all. I would say quite the reverse actually. But, you know, in the moment, this is how you feel. So either I was going to do a diary. Which meant that sometimes it's what you thought at the time. It was like a teenage girl or whatever. Swift insights radically expressed and then move on. And I wanted to do that. And I did obviously make a lot of choices about, you know, is this gone too far? And I felt that I kept it on keel and that most of the time people would come out of it thinking, you know what?”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I wanted, I mean, I feel actually that most of my book is really very affectionate in the end. I mean, I loved the people that I worked with, but they frustrated me at moments tremendously as I did them without doubt. So I felt important to keep it in the moment where”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right, and she had this word that she would use, which coming from London, I also didn't understand, which was, quote, to have a conversation. Now, I didn't know that the phrase to have a conversation meant to fuss somebody's ass out the door, right? So she'd say, Tina, would you like me to have a conversation with Tracy? And I go, oh, thank you. Yes, I'd love you to have a conversation with her. Next thing I know, you like Tracy's out the door with her. She's gone.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's very interesting. It'll give us a chance to test out our maternity policies. She actually, in the end, she went off to work at Este Lauder. I'd like to see her again because she probably didn't realize she was going to become a hero to me. But she was because she had this huge binder of her.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pamela Van Zant, who was known as PVZ. Yeah. And she was a very glamorous figure to me, oddly, because I'd never met a corporate woman before in London. We just didn't have corporate women in London at all in that era in 84. And Pam Anzant, you know, I said she had smooth skin-like Scandinavian furniture. She seemed to be so blonde and perfect with her. Just, she was so corporate. I can't explain why. And when I got pregnant, she said to me, when I told her I was pregnant, she said,”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, you have to know how to manage. And there are times when it's very difficult for me to do that. Particularly when I hired friends. One of the heroes of the book, actually, Oddly, is the HR”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ownership I'm glad you say that really because I do sort of want to try to write a book in a sense as well. I did think about this when I was writing it for sort of young women who are sort of coming into power, how to come into power.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He could And I In Milan of Antifa, I'm thinking Like, you know, why wasn't I even consulted here? But that's It's mine. It's my ownership and stuff like that. So, one of the other parts that is the office politics, I think you'll get them beautifully. And you don't know these people, but you start to get to know them and how you put together and how to fire people. There's a lot about management in here, like someone that wasn't on your side, who was continuing to be backbied you from the old administration. There's a lot of like, I learned a lot of management lessons from in here. I don't do that quite as much, but it was really interesting.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well he could. He could leave me hanging. He could also suddenly go off and do something which really irritated me, which is having, you know, when I created Vanity Fair, he would just go off and launch Italian Vanity Fair without speaking to me, you know, and I would suddenly find some Italian in my office saying, you know, hello, where is the pictures for the April issue? And I would think, who are you? He says, I am, you know, the founder of Milan of Antifa. I was thinking, you know, like, screw that. It's like, you know, why wasn't I even consulted here? That's just the way Sai was. He was trying to make the point. It's mine, actually. It's mine.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then he would come back in January and he would just stop firing everybody and rearranging it all and three publishers would go out the door and two editors and he'd buy three things. And I suddenly thought, well, that was the way he expressed his power. He couldn't express his power any way except doing that. So sometimes he got really kind of really made a lot of pieces move it very, very fast.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very boring there and people answered the phone on the third ring I thought was so typically psy, you know. Such a Thurba character. Yeah.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never knew what was going to happen. And actually, we used to find that January was a very dangerous month because he would never fire anybody between November and Christmas because it was Christmas, it was holidays. You don't fire people on Thanksgiving or whatever. But he would obviously be wrestless. He was dying to do it. So he would go off always to Vienna, which he always chose. I once said to him, why do you always go to Vienna? He just said,”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a rich guy to deal with, but I became very, very faci He was mercurial, he was a fascinating character because he was a sort of reluctantly powerful man. He was so shy and insecure himself and short and nebbishy. And, you know, I mean, he wasn't a guy who was a sort of threw his weight around. And he also enjoyed the stardom of his editors, which is very, very unusual. I mean, a lot of people feel competitive with the people they hire. And when they start to become celebrated, get very sort of angry about it and feel jealous. That was never true of Sai. I mean, he was like a great Hollywood studio owner in the sense he liked his star studio of all his big writers and his big editors and he liked that very much. And he actually loved my success and he was very proud of it. But he was also very mercurial. I mean, he was constantly firing people. He was so restless all the time.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've never been good at cruising. No, it's good than that. Like, you were, you did an astonishing job on Sci New House, and you were not kind to him, but you were not unkind. You know what I mean? No, I had to.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. You felt like a startup. It felt like it did. Well, in many ways it was. I mean, I think I've always had that sort of precarious sense that it could all blow up at any minute and sometimes it has. And I actually think though that that's a spur, you know, to do your best, isn't it? I mean, a sense that There's no such thing as cruising. I've never been good at cruising. I really am not good at cruising. No”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're the ringmaster. You have to go to. Right, and reflected of the time. Right, and reflected of the time. And you did talk about that, and you said surely what the New Yorker needs is to be not just a writer's magazine, but a reader's magazine, because writers are less guided and edited and lured out of their comfort zones can go off-piece into a drearily cul-de-sacs of introversion and excess and entirely forget the questions of content and pace.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think a good editor has to be an impresario. I think you're an impresario of talent. You're the ringmaster. You have to be able to bring in the music and bring down the lights and have writers and editors. And it all has to mix together. A lot of the sort of work of an editor, I think, is sort of casting. It's not just about I will hire a certain editor. It's about will this editor work well with this writer in this mix, in our office? You know, you need to cast these things and reflect it of the time. And reflected of the time.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Um, I don't have a lot of gusto for creative life, you know, I mean, I'm always restlessly looking for something to create. I have a lot of ideas at any one time that some of them bad, but some of them are good and turn out well. And I like the chance people to show it and express it.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really, no, I mean I felt that I was this was my big chance. I mean, I've always thought, you know, I'm a girl of the arena. You know, I mean, I like to be in the action. You know, I do. I want to be the one who's sort of striving for the big thing. I don't want to be sort of dialing myself back and thinking I'll take on something I can handle. I like biting off things I can't, you know, more than I can shoot.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of murders, and Dominic Dunn, of course, was our star writer, and Dominic became the great sort of pulp fiction writer almost of Monity Fair, writing about...”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of people Somehow the time made them into those things. Yeah, and at one point you were depicting your culture. The thought of the city gives me herpes of the brain, the hairdressing, the breakneck showers, the seething lemo rides, the shouting over noisy restaurants, the ceaseless clamor of thirsty egos, the umbridge and dungeon and fencing and foiling, and yet I know that if I'd left I'd want to get it back. Which was really interesting. So you were editing a magazine that sort of celebrated a lot of this too and that was very not celebrated. We chronicled it. We chronicled it. We chronicled it.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, I think she might read it now and say, yeah, that is who I was. Because a lot of people actually have evolved beyond that. I mean, I like people like Gayfried Stein Irvin, Caroline Rome today, because they're not those women, actually, anymore. Somehow the time made them into the world.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, here it is, whose hungry face and anorectic shoulders were on the other side of Harry. Her eyes were starry with strain and the quest for protection. She wore it which looked worn down by French lessons and piano lessons and cordon blue master taster menus for every dinner party she hosts. It just goes like I felt bad for Carolyn Rome for the first time in my life.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I trusted in a sense that I could describe people of a kind and a type, so you don't have to know or care really who Caroline Rome is. She's simply the anorexic socialite”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, in a way, you know, one of my thoughts was here are these sort of 80s figures of bullface, you know, W magazine, some of them. And are they going to still be interesting? And I decided that, you know, ultimately that kind of all people in a novel, really. It's like Fannity Feather novel. It's like Thackeray's world, ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether this person was called Caroline Rome or what she's called. She's a character in New York in the type. She's a type.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stating but accurate. You know what I mean? Like, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. You have Denise Hale. Now Denise Hale is lying back in her chair with a program over her head and Prentiss is drumming his fingers and blaspheming. Hale is an animal, Tina, an animal. These quotes that you have are amazing. What are our spoiled concerns compared to the pain of all their loss? You know, like then you turn and very sad. And it's a really interesting revelation into your, that was it an AIDS event that Steve rebelled. You just continue, Carolyn Rome. All these people I remember, these people of the day, because you also chronicled them in Vanity Fair. Sure”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you wouldn't because you wouldn't have known how successful it would be necessarily. So the descriptiveness, one of the things that's really great about it is how much you throw people under the bus in a really clever and incredibly truthful way. I mean, some people say, you know, listen, I get called mean all the time, which is fine with me. But it's not mean because it's truthful the way you're talking about these people. I find it some of the descriptions just”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't think I would necessarily publish them, I thought maybe one day, you know, one sometimes thinks that. I never really thought about that when I was writing them at all.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I didn't really think about everything's material. I never thought you don't write letters thinking they're going to be published. You know what I mean? I just did it because it was a need. It was a therapy need, really. It was about unloading my thoughts and explaining myself to myself.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the magazine had to reflect that. It was partly that a lot of it was the quest for that. I would think, oh, well, I don't feel like going well, but I might get a story. And I always did. Right.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a character and I also began to find it just it just fed so many stories it fed the leads it fed the sources it fed where I could get stuff it fed and also the social world of that time you know if you had a glossy upscale magazine I mean that was the sort of the photo”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is highly detailed, and of course at the time it also was his wildly social time. So after about a year, I was taken up. When the magazine began to succeed,”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My husband was in Washington at that point because he got a job there first. US News, and he, you know, so I was there on my own. I used to come in and I used to just think, I'd sit down, I would scribble my diary. Also, most of my friends were in London. So I had sort of no one, I might have caught, if I'd been at home, you did go out a lot. I went out a lot. But I also might have called a girlfriend and unloaded what happened. But I didn't really have any girlfriends. So I sort of sat and unloaded into my diary. And I'm so glad I did because those details are what really, but you never remember that later. No.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not every night, but a lot of nights. By hand. By hand in my sort of school books, I'd always been a diarist, you know, in the sense I'd always loved writing a diary, but I also think because I was new in New York and had so much to sort of, I was vibrating with the discovery of it all.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were very much diaries. I mean, as it is in the book, Pretty much as it's written. I mean, I did shape it, you know, cut it, explain who people were. But basically these diaries are contemporaneous. And I wrote them in a kind of mad frenzy.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said to me, Look, I'll come to him, I'll figure out something in America. You take this job, which is how he always is, which is wonderful.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Times newspapers was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 83, I think it was, and And he had a famous, noisy kind of front page of the fight with Murdoch because Murdoch wanted him to skew towards Mrs. Thatcher all the time. And he didn't. He wanted her to keep his news values intact. And so he fired Harry and Harry in a swashbuckling end, kind of jumped out of there. And so in a sense, we were both sort of free and ready to make our lives anew.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, actually fired. Oh, he's wonderful. Yes. Harry was editor of The Sunday Times, very celebrated. In fact, his newspaper appears in 2000, voted him the greatest newspaper ever, which I thought was sort of wonderful. And, you know, he”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had the interview with Sign New House? Did you wear a chase coffee? Because that would be wrong today. It would be wrong. It might have been very successful, but it might have been wrong. But, you know, Sign Newhouse, who owned Connin Nast and Alexander Lieberman, his great editorial director, who was a very sort of Douglas Fairbanks character, Russian painter. Sad New Picasso, all of that. They were sitting there, and they interviewed me for this job and they basically said, you know, it's yours if you want it. And I then I didn't choke. I said, I want it. They said, okay, well, you have to start right after Christmas. So I went back to spend Christmas with Harry in Barbados, and he was fantastic. He said, you've got to do it, have to do it. I'll figure something up.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I kind of thought I'd blown it, but then I suddenly get this call to ask if I could. So I arrived from Barbados to go to New York for this job interview with a kind of suitcase full of cheesecloth bikinis.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Editor of the Tatler, not? No, I'd left the Tadler in the meantime. I had got restless. I tend to get restless and jump out of the room. You are a restless. I'm a restless. I jumped out of Tatler to go back to writing and kind of regretted it immediately. Because it's a power base. Because a power base. And I realized I was back to exactly what I felt before, which is I was asking editors if it was okay to write this piece and they were saying, well, I don't know. What about doing this other piece? Oh, Tina, I don't like working for people either. I just didn't like it at all. So I sat in London thinking, God, I choked, you know, I should have just stayed there in New York.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, he was old and pretentious and the whole thing was just not working. And I felt I could do it. I mean, it helped to sharpen my sense that I could do it when I realized that he couldn't. But I thought I'd blown it because I'd said kind of no, yes, no, yes. And, you know, I was only a consultant. So they asked if I would stay. They said, you know, will you come and stay? And essentially band-aid this editor. And I was very cocky. I mean, I basically said, no, it's either the editorship or I'm going home. And they dithered and said, we just put him in. I said, okay, well, I'm going back to London. And I leapt on a plane, went back to London. And then I felt I'd completely blown it. I sat in London, you know, thinking.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hesitated tremendously, but I came, and actually it was useful to do because I realized once I'd been there a few months, that Leoluman, the editor, could not do it. I realized that he was as big a fiasco as his predecessor.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Culture Maven. And then at that point, they'd ask me to come over and be a consultant from London because I had, you know, they thought, let's bring her in hesitate.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Vanity Fair in its heyday was this sort of cultural, high-toned, witty magazine that was edited by a great editor, Frank Crownenshield, who was the first to publish cubism in America and published Claire Booth Luce and Dorothy Parker. And, you know, it was a very busy. It was a hot book just predating the New Yorker, which came along and ate its lunch, actually, but it was pre-New Yorker. That was the world. The smart set. The smart set, actually, yes, that was the title of its rival, as a matter of fact. And so the smart set already. So they wanted to bring back a new version of Vanity Fair, which would be probably less brittle than the smart set ERA one, but one that was really going to combine the sort of gravitas of the New Yorker with the smart set of the past. But they produced a turkey instead, and it was a disastrous turkey. Editor fired. Then they bring in a sort of, you know, he wasn't supposed to be interim. He was the features editor of Vogue, who had been in the company for 40 years, a kind of grand old.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Peace is saying it was going to be the best magazine anyone had ever read disastrous amount of hype declaring victory before declaring victory, vast budget. No one had ever heard such a budget.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Richard Locke. Richard Locke. And then Leonard. Very smart guy who'd been editor of the New York Book Review Times book review, but he wasn't anyone had ever edited a magazine before, and they had all this huge hype that it was coming. They had posters of John Irving in his underpants sort of saying, no contest and they had”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bought by Connie Nast, Sine New House, fell in love with Tatler. He thought it was great, came to London, sort of shopped and found us and bought us. And that meant we were part of the Mighty Colony Nast. And when they launched Vanity Fair, which brought it back from the dead, then they decided, let's ask the young Turk from London to come in and let him.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making farm poking fun, we took the upper classes who were supposed to be the establishment of the magazine and really made them irreverent. Plus, I also had the biggest social story of the century to cover, which was the rise of Princess Diana. And I mean, we covered that like CNN covered O.J. Simpson. We were just all over that story. We knew her. I'd met her. My staff had met her because I was 25. She was 20. You know, it was like there was a lot of people on our team who sort of knew well. London is a small place. So that really launched Tatler and made us, you know, we went from 10th hot. We are hot and buzzy. We went from 10,000 to 100,000.”
2017-11-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: magazine mogul Tina Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT