Tina Brown

Perhaps the amping up of the vogue for unreliable memoirs is the Internet’s fault. It makes everyone the star of their own media soap opera. In a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times about the rash of “bloggers” who pour uncensored play-by-plays of their private lives onto the Web, one of them, a Brooklyn theatrical producer named Jonathan Van Gieson, pleasantly comments that he now gives his friends pseudonyms in his weblogs to “toe the line between simple harmless betrayal of trust and nasty actionable libel.” (As in, “Let’s get together tonight for a simple harmless betrayal of trust.”)

Blumenthal’s book, “The Clinton Wars,” uses real names. It’s a compellingly feral account of the toxic political atmosphere that swirled around fin de siècle Washington. It captures the sensibility as much as the happenings of that deeply nasty era of Republican recklessness and Clintonian fecklessness. It traces the pedigree of every poisoned dart, every malevolent gambit of the Republican Savonarola Kenneth Starr. In one of these episodes Hitchens rats out Blumenthal to the special prosecutor for supposedly smearing Monica Lewinsky as a stalker in a conversation between old comrades that was either a routine gossip session over a liquid lunch or part of a White House plot to save a depraved president by destroying an innocent damsel, depending on whom you believe.

In Sid’s version, Hitchens is an inexplicable Judas driven by dark, mysterious compulsions to seek attention any way he can get it. Sounds right, actually. In a media world where every Op-Ed position must be conceived as a cable TV niche, Hitchens knows that his brand is Mr. Counterintuitive Contrarian, and he has always done it better than anyone else. Blumenthal’s book will give him another juicy opportunity for political vaudeville. It has already set off a rash of score settling from all the bloggers, polemicists and literary journalists in the payback business.

Blumenthal has always excited strong feelings. When I was editing the New Yorker and Sid was our chief Washington correspondent, I was constantly having to arbitrate disputes in the bureau over his Democratic partisanship that allegedly got in the way of other writers’ coverage of the Clinton White House. That rancor continues to run deep. In Washington last month at the funeral of the columnist and editor Mike Kelly — who also covered the Washington beat for us at the time — one of the mourners told me she had been asked to oversee Blumenthal’s ejection if he showed up at the church. (In one of the many lively moments in the book, Kelly’s belief that Blumenthal is spying on his copy for the first lady has him shouting, “You fucking asshole!” down the phone at Sid.) Despite all the aggravation in the bureau, I still have a soft spot for Sidney. At the Oxford Union-type public debates we sometimes used to stage at the New Yorker, it was always a touchingly Clark Kent moment when, just before striding to the podium, Sid would take off his glasses.

Blumenthal was absolutely right, of course, back in 1995 to keep insisting — almost alone, and in the face of the frenzy of the press pack and my own anxiety about missing the bus — that the allegations of Clinton corruption in the Whitewater affair were a big load of nothing. On the other hand, he was absolutely wrong to maintain — as he put it with maddening loftiness — that “It’s not a story.” Not a scandal, perhaps, but not a story? A cabal of right-wing fanatics manipulates the press, the judiciary, and the FBI to the point of nearly destroying a president and it’s not a story? It was a helluva story — as Sidney’s book amply shows. And the story isn’t over yet, as the Clinton wars continue to be fought in the reviews.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, for example, Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor of the New York Times, devotes a huge chunk of space to a haughty, patronizing and not especially convincing defense of his old paper’s Whitewater coverage. I guess if you’re a condescending Times editor, maybe it’s not your week.

As I doubt even he would bother to deny, Sid was in the tank for the Clintons. (He just thought the tank was full of Evian.) The truth is, I would have been more tolerant of Sid being in the tank if it had delivered the New Yorker a string of scoops. The big problem with being relentlessly nice to politicians or even just fair and balanced is that they repay you by never giving you any real news. Their press secretaries save the red meat to throw off the back of the sled at the ravening wolves from the Washington Post. Why else would G.W. Bush invite scary Bob Woodward in to write an authorized account of the buildup to the invasion of Afghanistan? So he doesn’t write the other book, the one where all the enemies talk. The Clinton White House knew Sid was the Democrats’ samurai so they went elsewhere to break their hottest stories.

This created a problem with Sid’s stuff as far as I was concerned. V hot it was not. But the book cooks.

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Diana took her celebrity and leveraged it into such moments of global humanitarian impact as being the first member of the British Establishment to kiss an AIDS baby, grasping the bandaged hand of a leper without gloves, and walking in an uncleared mine field to bring the media spotlight to the victims of anti-personnel mines. In her entire 16 years as Princess of Wales she was never once caught looking anything but her absolute best. Unlike Britney, Lindsay or any other of the pitiful starved waifs attached to hair weaves, she never acted out her private pain by throwing up in the backseat of a car, winding up in rehab or displaying her shaved pudenda to a stricken nation. If anyone else can think of a further point of resemblance between these two, suggestions gratefully received.

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I never for one moment thought the Prince William and Kate Middleton relationship was actually over. It merely went underground to hide from the feral media beast. It was typical somehow of the British press to immediately assume that William had dumped Kate because her mother didn’t have the right accent.

All my palace sources informed me that it was Kate who’d gone extremely cold-feet-ish about the situation. Originally, I am told, William had wanted Kate to be one of the presenters at the memorial concert for Diana this Sunday, July 1 — a notion nixed by the queen herself, who said, “We don’t want another media queen like Diana.” Buckingham Palace courtiers soon began to use the same on-message word about Kate — “flaky,” which is palace euphemism for way too much press and getting a little too demanding about having her own voice.

But make no mistake: William is nuts about Kate. The two of them had even canvassed an engagement announcement between the Sunday concert and the memorial service for Diana in August before it was all called off.

Now they’ve been sighted together. Don’t bet on the poised and private Miss Middleton being counted out as the future Her Maj.

On the other hand, why would she want it? Being Princess of Wales even post-Diana is almost a fate worse than death. The romance with the bachelor prince all begins as it did in Diana’s case with the dream but swiftly, even by the time of the honeymoon, will turn into the scream. What people often fail to understand about Diana’s story is that it wasn’t just the Camilla issue that was the curse. It was the oldness, coldness and dismal inevitability of the royal routine that made Diana feel as if she had been sealed living in a tomb. William can only handle it because he was born to it. Thanks to Diana’s nurturing as a wonderfully touchy-feely mom, William comes across as modern and young and hot and informal, but he is also, in one of Diana’s favorite phrases about the family, “Windsorized.” At heart William is a very conservative boy — he loves hunting, shooting and fishing. He wants to be a farmer, and he has been steeped from the cradle in the inevitable duty that is his lot.

It would really be better for William if he married some ugly, invisible duchess, not a beautiful commoner like Kate. She would avoid the fate of becoming a global superstar, and not make the other royals jealous. She would be left in peace as she goes through the inevitable bulimia and postpartum depression attendant on being a zoo animal in a national theme park.
 

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NBC, after its shameful performance, ponying up a million bucks to interview Paris Hilton (and then not), at least had a sense of priorities in paying to televise Sunday’s concert in memory of Princess Diana. It promises to be just the kind of thing Diana would have loved, a celebration of her life not her death, the details of which the world has been so fixated on for the last 10 years.
 
The only thing that surprised me in Matt Lauer’s short interview with the boys tied to the concert was Prince Harry’s unfortunate comment: “Whatever happened in that tunnel, no one will ever know. And I’m sure people will always think about that the whole time.” My liege, we have been through 10 years of investigations about what happened in the Paris tunnel and it is clear that what happened was a traffic accident with a drunken driver, pure and simple. Any other version is simply the fairy story put around with obnoxious brilliance by Mohamed Fayed, unable to bear the fact Diana and his son died in a car with driver and bodyguard procured by his hotel, the Ritz.

The Operation Paget inquiry rigorously conducted by the former chief of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Stevens, reconstructed what happened in the tunnel with 3-D lasers and computer models. No doubt what Harry meant was he will never stop wondering about his mother’s state of mind that last sad, and chaotic, night of her life, but his comment is sure to be fully misinterpreted by the Fayed conspiracy machine.

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One thing is for sure, all the images the concert will show of Diana’s global acts of kindness will remind the world powerfully of how much she is missed. Bono, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and the other current celebrity humanitarians are following the template set by her, except she always did it better. Celebrities who work these particular veins are always having to prove something to their beneficiaries: that they’re not merely pretty faces yearning to spruce up their images on the backs of downtrodden Africans and Asians. Diana had no such problem. Her princesshood had given her that right from the moment she made her vows at St. Paul’s Cathedral. What better explanation could there be for her charity than the most obvious one: that she meant it?

On Sunday Diana would have been 46. Let’s at least celebrate on her birthday what she achieved in the short blaze of her incredible life

I’m sitting in a pleasant reverie at my desk when the phone explodes with a call from Peggy Siegal, New York’s publicity diva, who’s flacking Peter Weir’s new movie, “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” based on the Patrick O’Brian seafaring series.

“Tina!” she yells. “I need your name! NO! Wait a minute! Harry’s name!” (Harry is my husband.) “‘Master and Commander!’ Russell Crowe! Shot in the same tank as ‘Titanic’! I’ve got all these boat guys hosting! Writers! William F. Buckley! Bartle Bull! Peter Matthiessen! Harry’ll love it! Could he do it on the 9th? Or he could do it on the 3rd? Or the 6th? Or he could just show up at the Yacht Club on the 1st with Walter Cronkite?!”

Other P.R.’s come on with a subtler approach. The one that begins, “There’s this wonderful little Irish movie we’re very worried will get overlooked.” I’m a sucker for creative sob stories, so before I know it I have spent an hour combing my Rolodex for brand-name leprechauns or historians of the potato famine who might be willing to stoke the word of mouth.

The “screener” ban, which Valenti mandated in an attempt to foil DVD piracy, has ended up being torture for him. But his belated attempt at a truce will only create him more aggravation. All he’s done has created a new caste system. If 6,000 Academy voters are allowed to receive the screeners but not the other creative shops, then the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, the Critics Circle and that louche fraternity known as the Hollywood Foreign Press have in effect been told they’re not to be trusted. In the new scheme of things they are just rabble, outlaws, garlic-breathed Pirates of the Caribbean.

It was always such a great opportunity for lordly condescension among movie execs to be able to send out beribboned boxes of the latest Christmas movies to 500 of their closest Botox artists, dog walkers and Kabbalah gurus. And for otherwise perkless recipients it was a nod that you were an insider. You might be a miserable entertainment scribe eating Chinese takeout in a socklike apartment, but a box of Oscar screeners arriving by FedEx told you you were cool. These guys know they’ll never get back on the list.

The P.R. amazons like Siegal whose task it now is to get these grumpy buzzocrats out of their TV chairs into a theater are not helped by the fact that this year’s movie crop is so heavy on downers. It’s a tough sell to ask a bunch of friends over for a drink and a look at, say, “Elephant,” Gus Van Sant’s grim real-time reconstruction of the hours before a Columbine-style school massacre. After viewing five impending releases on five straight days the only laugh in the theater all week was during “Sylvia,” when Gwyneth Paltrow, playing Sylvia Plath, brightens the mood of a romantic rowboat excursion with the poet Ted Hughes by suddenly intoning in her flat “literary” voice, “I tried to drown myself once.”

Academy members themselves can’t be solicited to host screenings. That’s why the hunt is on for any other genre of person with a Rolodex to host a preview that might fan the hype. Writers are in particular demand because they add credibility. Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein may have been the first moviemaker cum marketing genius to come up with this method of collecting interest on borrowed intellectual capital. When we were in business together at Talk magazine, I always sensed that he was wondering why the hell I couldn’t produce J.D. Salinger for an opening. Now the practice of writer-hosted screenings is so rampant I expect any day to get an invitation from Gabriel Garcéa Marquéz and Thomas Pynchon inviting me to a preview of “Elf.”

The trouble with approaching “real writers,” as Hollywood likes to call them (meaning, I suppose, writers who write books, not “pages”), to host these promotional events is that the more seriously talented they are, the weirder they tend to be. Real writers also are prone to having real opinions. And they become “difficult” when required to suppress them.

The writers you see at parties are not usually the “real” ones. Real writers are usually sitting in a chaotic farmhouse somewhere with a five-day growth of beard and a stained T-shirt in an onanistic trance at their computers, or else trying to kill themselves like Sylvia Plath. They don’t like to be disturbed.

If the DVD ban gets repealed, though, it will be because of the most powerful lobbying group of all: not filmmakers or executives, but their kids. They’ve all been in meltdown about being deprived of having friends over to view their big-shot dad’s Oscar screeners. Hollywood is full of New Age fathers who are happy to blow off corporate lawyers and each other but will never say no to their kids.

“These two didn’t win the jackpot. They stole it. They had an obligation to tell the board of directors. They didn’t,” says prosecutor Kenneth Chalifoux. “These defendants were the gatekeepers. They had the power to take the money. But not the authority.”

The prosecutor’s low-key delivery must be especially deadly for Kozlowski’s amour-propre. It’s one thing to be taken apart by some big-time legal showboat. It’s another to have to listen to a quiet, patient, supremely effective demolition by a conscientious, friendly-eyed, salaried public employee like Chalifoux. By the time we enter the second hour of his remarks, Kozlowki’s pastel-pink head has turned a deep, throbbing magenta.

I wonder what role height plays in a sense of entitlement. At its best it can give the sublime grace of the much-mourned George Plimpton, whose sunflower presence I kept searching for Tuesday night among all the other tall, patrician, white-haired men who circulated at the packed Paris Review 50th anniversary. (There were so many I wondered if it was George’s last prank, providing the literary version of multiple Saddam Husseins.) George’s loftiness, however, was never aloof, which seems to be the rap on Sen. John Kerry when people are looking for a reason he shouldn’t or won’t get the Democratic nomination.

But in the steroid-pumped age of Arnold Schwarzenegger it might be great counterprogramming for the Democrats to have a long, cool glass of water who could look down his French nose at Republican gaucheries and show off his impressive mastery of facts. Last spring, when I first saw him talk to a bunch of New York players and money guys, I thought he came off as unacceptably Olympian. But maybe that was because he chose to address that hard-nosed group from halfway up the staircase of a private club, and we had to shout our questions from below in the prayer position.

A lot has happened since then. Like desperation. In the CNN debate in Phoenix Kerry suddenly looked terrifically presidential when he came out on his stilts from behind his podium and started leaning over toward the audience, gesturing with his big bony hands. Team the elongated Kerry with Gephardt’s sandy brush-fire eyebrows and proletarian back story, and the two of them might have a show they could take on the road.

There’s no doubt that height is a useful weapon of effortless intimidation. Reagan used it on Carter, Bush I on Dukakis. It promises to be an increasing problem for Howard Dean in the long term. For an out-of-nowhere contender it’s not a bad thing to be a feisty little spitfire, but in the last days of a vicious race there will be too many photo ops he’ll have to avoid. Male or female, when Clinton flops that big blond paw down on a recalcitrant shoulder it always brings another vote around. The junior Bush, one feels, though of respectably average height, would not be so dependent on that pickup truck or landing on aircraft carriers in basket-flashing flight suits if he were three patrician inches taller, like his dad.

The size question, in more ways than one, is clearly a factor in the Kobe Bryant case. If the defense team’s new panty evidence is right, he may be exonerated after all. But the dog that hasn’t barked in this story is the mystery of Kobe’s sex life. He’s a great-looking, rich, human skyscraper of an athletic demigod in Los Angeles. He should have had a lot of sex before he tied the knot, right? So where is it? Every talk show has wheeled out a cast of undishy acquaintances from his past who say he was the perfect gentleman. The worst was the roundfaced high school sweetheart Jocelyn Ebron whom Kobe not only dumped but allowed to learn about his marriage to Vanessa by seeing it on TV. Larry King nearly had a stroke trying unsuccessfully to wring something salacious or vindictive out of Jocelyn and her memories of five years with Bryant. Given the fun that other athletes have over the backs of chairs when the game’s over, it’s Kobe’s apparent lack of it in the past that gave the first accusations we heard an extra wallop of hidden weirdness.

Kobe has not been helped by the fact that in the sports world he has no real constituency. According to my friend Chris Connolly of ESPN, the people who liked Kobe best were media types, because he was so friendly and cooperative and eager to please. But sportswriters have daughters, too. Now they felt betrayed. Bryant wasn’t popular with other players, or with his coaches all that much, or with fans in other cities — he got booed in Philadelphia at an All-Star game. The street ballers didn’t like him because he was too high-class and well-mannered, with his Italian upbringing and me-against-the-world reserve. Kobe’s lack of a fervently loyal base gives him something in common with, well, Gray Davis. And we know what happened to him.

It gives Democrats pause about Wesley Clark. He looks so perfect on paper. The four stars. The keen mind. The neat head. But where’s his baggage? The great thing about having survived a media gangbang is that it quells the need to answer questions. Anything bad can be dismissed as an old story.

New York’s “progressive” Democratic power players are getting frantic. Until a few months ago they were still numb from the one-two punch of 2000 and 9/11. Bush’s decline in the polls jerked them awake. Their loathing of Bush has risen to such a crescendo they will take any candidate who looks like a winner. A lot of them are excited by Dean, but they’re ready to ditch him the minute he looks like a loser. They don’t want to dick around with noble lost causes. They don’t have time for self-appointed Seabiscuits. They want a War Admiral — and they trudge from chic little soirees for Wes Clark to gilded breakfasts for John Kerry hoping to find one.

At a “political brainstorm” supper the other night, hosted by a brand-name author who’s also a Democratic activist, a bunch of West Side legends with plenty of cash to spare sat with dinner on their laps and harangued each other about the need for action. In truth, the host had convened them so he could put the arm on them on behalf of the DNC, but they wouldn’t have come if he’d told them that. “Money’s not the issue here,” one of them thundered (to the host’s chagrin). “Everyone in this room has given at least half a million bucks to the party in their time.” No, they wanted to talk ideas. They wanted to talk tactics. Most of all they wanted to talk winning.

One recurring theme was the longing for a rapid-response war room to beat off Republican “disinformation.” When Rush Limbaugh’s OxyContin habit hit the airwaves, for instance, Democrats lacked what Republicans would have had in their shoes: a ready-to-go bullet-point list of all the times Rush had mouthed off about how drugs are all the fault of permissive liberals. “I’m happy to give money to that!” shouted a theater producer.

“We don’t have a bulldog to run it!” cried a former prime-time star. “We need a bulldog!”

“Why can’t we get James Carville back?” demanded a Broadway actress.

“He’s doing ‘K Street’,” replied a screenwriter, matter-of-factly.

“Another James Carville then!” said the actress, rising restlessly to her feet and pacing the room.

“Another bulldog!” cried the prime-time star.

Al Franken has become the Democrats’ messiah. His well-publicized row with Fox’s bloodhound Bill O’Reilly — as much as anything to do with Iraq — was the magic wand that broke the Republican spell and turned Roger Ailes back into a frog. Any Manhattan dinner party you show up at these days feels like a Franken publishing party, with a pile of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” sitting on the hall table as a shiny guest giveaway. Franken was the star — greeted with shrieks and yodels of delight — who followed Al Sharpton’s Little Richard routine at the DNC dinner at the New York Sheraton after the Pace University debate.

At Bruce Springsteen’s tour-climaxing concerts at Shea Stadium last week, the Boss prefaced “Born in the USA” by telling the mammoth crowds, “Pick up Al Franken’s book!”

New York Republicans talk privately about the need to crank up the other big stars on the GOP bench if Bush keeps heading south. Arnold may be the biggest of them all by the time of next year’s convention in New York — or else he may be the party’s biggest embarrassment.

Meanwhile, there’s Rudy Giuliani — and, unlike Arnold, Rudy is constitutionally eligible for a spot on the national ticket. Friends wonder if Rudy is gearing up to be ready when — O.K., if — Bush dumps Cheney. His friends say he spends an inordinate amount of time on the phone with Karl Rove. Rudy would be W’s ace in the hole, should he get scared (and brave) enough to play it.

The current V.P.’s ominous scowl doesn’t do much to lift the nation’s spirits. On “Meet the Press” he looked so freighted with administration secrets he seemed to be addressing Tim Russert from a low crouch position. Cheney’s Halliburton connection clings to the administration like a gust of halitosis. Rudy would be political Binaca. And his 9/11 halo would help the president shift focus away from Iraq misadventures and back to fighting the terrorists who actually attacked us.

Rudy stands in the public mind for lionhearted crisis management. His new Churchillian receding hairline gives him more gravitas than ever. As V.P. he could bigfoot the homeland security portfolio without the political hazards that have sidelined Tom Ridge. And as the corporate scandals revive with a slew of high-profile trials, Rudy brings credentials as a Wall Street crime buster.

Maybe New Yorkers love the Giuliani-for-veep scenario because of what it promises for the presidential election in 2008 — a revival of Rudy vs. Hillary. (The original version of that show closed in out-of-town tryouts, though the female star triumphed with a solo act.) The two of them may have more baggage than the hold of a 747, but they have prevailed.