Tina Brown

I had a budget of £10,000, you know.

budgets were in the U.S.

Four years into Tatler, it was bought by the big American magazine company, Condé Nast, which the chairman was S.I.

Newhouse Jr.

He bought Tatler because he loved what I was doing.

Then he started Vanity Fair in New York, which was a revamp, a relaunch, if you like, of the great magazine of the 20s and 30s, which had died just before during the war.

And he wanted to relaunch it to be a sort of rival to the New Yorker at that time.

So he asked me to come over and do it, which was the most extraordinary break anyone could have had, you know, to do.

But he really sort of believed that, you know, what they needed after launching it and it had been a catastrophe, they'd had two failed editors and they poured all this money and had a huge contract.

glamorous you know noisy launch and it had a turkey you know it had just flopped and so they thought let's just bring in youth you know from London and I had nothing to lose so of course I was wildly excited and I leapt across the Atlantic.

Dreamy days.

Yeah.

Dreamy days.

Well, actually, you see, it wasn't nonsense to do it because, you know, it was a prosperous industry.

People were buying magazines, advertising, you know, was strong.

I was stunned when I got to the New Yorker because having had a £10,000 budget, I just could not believe that they were doing things like

buying the entire Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Marquez and paying him like $100,000.

I mean, it was just utterly like Alice in Wonderland to me.

So I was stunned by it.

But I also, you know, it was a wonderful thing to be able to assign and find writers and be given that freedom to bring writers in.