Starting in 1984, British-import editor Tina Brown remade the glossy fashion monthly into one long celebration of the rich, famous, often reptilian New York crowd she was hanging out with -- people like Henry Kissinger, junk-meister Michael Milken, and cafe aristocrat Claus von Bulow (who narrowly beat the charge of murdering his wife). The stupid, vicious union-busting of NY Daily News editor James Hoge was made to sound Churchillian. And these, mind you, were some of the more serious personalities the magazine covered. Its stock-in-trade was and remains the absurdly long Hollywood or fashion celebrity profile, brightened with photography by Annie Leibovitz, and with everything critical excised. You might think that no one could devote thousands of words to Mick Jagger the man without working in a salacious anecdote or two. But you'd be wrong.
Still, Brown does finally seem to have kissed the 80s goodbye. She ran
Norman Mailer's defense of Stone's "JFK," and harder-edged pieces on issues
like BCCI. Now, if she could just drop those perfume-ad inserts that smell
like bug-spray.... -- Steve Badrich
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