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The Vanity Fair Diaries

1983--1992

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

This program is read by the author.
Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood.
The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her twenties who arrives in New York City with a dream. Summoned from London in hopes that she can save Condé Nast's troubled new flagship Vanity Fair, Tina Brown is immediately plunged into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet's slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company. She survives the politics, the intrigue, and the attempts to derail her by a simple stratagem: succeeding. In the face of rampant skepticism, she triumphantly reinvents a failing magazine.
Here are the inside stories of Vanity Fair scoops and covers that sold millions—the Reagan kiss, the meltdown of Princess Diana's marriage to Prince Charles, the sensational Annie Leibovitz cover of a gloriously pregnant, naked Demi Moore. In this cinematic audiobook, the drama, the comedy, and the struggle of running an "it" magazine come to life. Brown's Vanity Fair Diaries is also a woman's journey, of making a home in a new country and of the deep bonds with her husband, their prematurely born son, and their daughter.
Astute, open-hearted, often riotously funny, Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries is a compulsively fascinating and intimate chronicle of a woman's life in a glittering era.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 20, 2017
      The pathbreaking editor records her greatest success and the effervescent media-biz surrounding it in this scintillating memoir. Brown (The Diana Chronicles) collects diary from her editorship at Vanity Fair, which she made into a must-read trendsetter with a mix of glamorous photo spreads (a picture of a nude and heavily pregnant Demi Moore became an icon), high-toned tabloid sagas of celebrities-in-distress like Claus von Bulow and Princess Di, and probing feature articles like William Styron's depression confessional "Darkness Visible." It's a frenzied story of last-minute photo dramas ("There was a problem getting the horse into the elevator"), editing tussles, pilgrimages to beg ads from fashion designers, and wary sparring with the magazine's shy but ruthless owner Si Newhouse. Swirling around the VF narrative is Brown's reportage on countless power lunches and cocktail parties, full of hilariously acid portraits of movie stars, socialites, literary lions and plutocrats, from Wallace Shawn ("a small, anxious hippo" with "a creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes") to Donald Trump (a "sneaky, petulant infant" with a "pouty Elvis face" who poured a drink down a VF staffer's back after she wrote something unflattering about him). The result is a witty, exuberant portrait of print journalism's last golden age. Photos.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Originally from Great Britain, Tina Brown, former editor of THE NEW YORKER and VANITY FAIR, offers a rather offhand, sluggish narration of these self-aggrandizing diary entries. The name-dropping diaries were kept within the span of her years at VANITY FAIR. Here, in all their glory, are the excessive and extravagant go-go 1980s, but this chronicling of expensive and expansive entertainments and meals out is more likely to be of interest to those who were in her orbit at that time; otherwise, the work is absent any spark to ignite others' interest. This lack of context for the average listener creates a repetitive series of tales of big egos and even bigger sums of cash to be expensed to the Cond� Nast Corporation. Skillful power-brokering is also discussed, but that doesn't save the overall lack of appeal of the listening experience. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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