Congratulatory calls poured in. Lerman’s papers, now collected at Columbia, show phone messages from a group that reads like a Who’s Who of 1980s media and literary insiders, including William Styron, Clive Barnes, Stanley Crouch, Paul Goldberger, Jason Epstein, Edward Kosner, and Dominique Browning. Another name on the list was Tina Brown, a young British editor who had made a name for herself when she reinvigorated Tatler, which she had begun editing four years earlier. Newhouse was so impressed with the makeover she had given the hoary old London monthly that, in 1982, he’d purchased it.
Lerman Bows Out; Ibrown Swoops In
It should come as no surprise, given Lerman’s wide-open nature, that his were the first issues of Vanity Fair to include letters from the editor. The covers also underwent a change, in a move strongly recommended by Liberman. Out went quiet illustrations and artsy David Hockney photos; in came a succession of black-and-white portraits by Irving Penn. The subjects were not the movie stars who sit for covers these days, but the writers Italo Calvino, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, and Francine du Plessix Gray. The first nod to celebrity on a Vanity Fair cover came toward the end of Lerman’s reign, with a black- and-white Penn portrait (originally shot for Vogue) depicting Woody Allen as Groucho Marx, with grease-paint mustache and cigar.
Inside, the lineup was changing, too. For one thing, the magazine started to rediscover its edge and its sense of surprise and irreverence. Yes, there was a rather leaden novella from Saul Bellow (36 pages worth), but there was now a fresh-faced Jennifer Beals, from Flashdance; original art by Keith Haring; stories that ran the gamut from “A Moral Epidemic,” about the early years of the AIDS crisis, to the circus star Carla Wallenda; and a little sex in the form of Leibovitz’s portraits of Olympic diver Greg Louganis, submerged, and actress Mariel Hemingway, topless.
Circulation began to climb. But as the magazine’s fortunes rose, Lerman was on the wane: “Eyesight failing,” he wrote in his July 31 diary entry. “I can hardly see what I am scribbling, but I am optimistic. I am almost always optimistic.”
The staff, though, was not on its best behavior. Former editors recall the internal discord, which was virtually inevitable, given the upheaval after Locke’s dismissal; in short order, Lerman fired talents such as Renata Adler, John Leonard, and Carol Flake.
Tina Brown joined Vanity Fair, on Lerman’s watch, as a consultant. It wasn’t exactly clear to others on the floor what her duties entailed. “I remember going to the ladies’ room when Leo had just taken over,” says Carol Flake Chapman. “Tina was in the bathroom, and I didn’t even know who she was or what she was doing there. But suddenly—those piercing blue eyes! There was just something about her. I thought, ‘Hmmm, what’s going on?’ She came in sort of—not surreptitiously, but she was just there, hanging out. It was pretty clear Leo was not long for this world.”
Lerman’s assistant at the time, Stephen Pascal, would later edit the man’s massive diary into a major document of New York social history, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman, published in 2007, some 13 years after Lerman’s death. In a note inserted between two entries, Pascal mentions a kidney-stone attack that hospitalized Lerman in November 1983. “During this crisis,” writes Pascal, “he realized that the Vanity Fair assignment was overtaxing. He had tired of contending with the magazine’s fractious editors, although he was fond of many of them individually. Liberman’s constant watch and counsel, to which Leo customarily deferred, was not making leadership easier.”
A staff memo broke the not-unexpected news on January 4, 1984:
To: VANITY FAIR STAFF
From: S.I. Newhouse, Jr.
Early last year when Leo Lerman accepted editorial responsibility for Vanity Fair, he requested and I agreed that his appointment be considered an interim one during which he would set guidelines for the magazine.
I have been delighted with the results Leo has achieved. Launched in a flurry of controversy, Vanity Fair found itself quickly under Leo’s hand. Its content is now lively, witty, and contemporary ... critical reaction has turned from chilly to excellent ... circulation is firmly above rate base.
Almost as a postscript, in a diplomatic instance of burying the lede, Newhouse wrote the following:
Also, effective immediately, I have appointed a remarkably young journalist, Tina Brown, as Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair.
The diary awaited Lerman:
On this day my brief, but consuming, Vanity Fair life ended. I feel regret, some residue of anger, but most of all relief: A gigantic burden has been lifted from me, and another adventure begins.
The glorious farewell party the Vanity Fair staff literally threw—great torrents of confetti as thick as heaviest snow—and the love, which I never suspected, that filled my room; the remarkable “book” that the staff made. No other departure—not from Vogue, not from Mademoiselle, was so rich, so loving, so riotous an “affair.” But, of course, this departure was an unwilling going- out, and that helped make these (I thought cold) people love me.
Soon after, he wrote in pained fragments, punctuated by ellipses—and a few phrases hinted at his view of his successor:
Rather like being jilted, or having a lover run off with someone else ... not the same pain, but a similar anguish ... all too short a time ... why not a chance to have developed ... that sort of irritation ... and much mulling over what the new “one,” the supplanter, will do ... deep wishes that she not survive, that she go down in ignominy, while at all times (save when with intimates) one maintains an “I-don’t-care” surface.
Glancing back at his tenure, he devoted a later diary entry to his ex-boss:
A sudden realization that what caused our wretchedness at Condé Nast was Alex Liberman’s increasing paranoia. The sickness is that of all Russian “leaders,” which leads to the destruction of multitudes.
As Lerman wrote those words in February, his final issue as editor-in-chief—March 1984—was on the newsstands. Its cover, fittingly, was a throwback to the Crowninshield era: an illustration of an elegant 1920s-style dame, with cigarette. (It was drawn by Blair Drawson, who, as it turns out, is the cousin of the magazine’s current editor.) The next cover, Brown’s first, showed blond starlet Daryl Hannah, wearing a blindfold and clutching two Oscar statuettes.
In his new editor, Newhouse had found someone who liked to create a stir, throw soirees with abandon (Brown had recently published a book titled Life As a Party), and, most important, had a deft touch for finding that frothy mix of substance, swank, and whimsy that had been part of the magazine’s original identity. Frank Crowninshield may not quite have given it his blessing, but, then again, he would have approved of the parties.
