Under the round, silent shadow of William Shawn, editor in chief for 35 years, the New Yorker was urbane, literate and indifferent to the philistines. In short, it was intelligent. But by the time Shawn stepped down in 1987, two years after the magazine was purchased by media billionaire S.I. Newhouse, a good many of its pages were also subdued to the point of immobile. It was an atmosphere that Shawn's successor, Robert Gottlieb, did not do much to relieve. When Newhouse moved Tina Brown into the editor's job in 1992, it was for the plain purpose of making noise in the sanctuary.
Brown quickly refashioned the New Yorker in her own image--brainy, Anglophilic, profane and more than a little starstruck--which was probably a good match for most of the readers she was after. As former editor of Vanity Fair, she was schooled in the ways of Conde Nast Publications, the Newhouse family's high-luster group of magazines, which also include Vogue and GQ. She also understood that the New Yorker was different. Watching her try to blend the sacred and profane was one of the great journalistic pastimes of recent years. Her brain was a table-of-contents mosh pit: a place where a literary memoir mixed with a dispatch from Hollywood, followed by another from Paris--Adam Gopnik on French health clubs, for instance; then some Washington pages in which, say, Al Gore was pried open by Joe Klein; plus a hair-raising investigative piece on some wiggly strain of hepatitis; a dry, subtle poem by Louise Gluck; and a very readable short story--ideally one with a good shot of sex or a British name attached.
Granted, she put it all together in the service of buzz, the all-important chatter of readers, especially the ones in the New York-West Coast-Washington circuit. Yet Brown preserved in every issue a large core of thoughtful material. She brought on some conspicuously gifted writers, including David Remnick, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Anthony Lane and Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin). And the photographs that caused so much uproar when she first dropped them in, those big gray boulders of portraiture, hit the pages like dark meteors. Attention must be paid.
She also made the magazine unblushing about sex. Don't tell the Disney people now colonizing 42nd Street (the ones for whom Brown will soon be working), but that's New York, the city of bright, cogitating mammals. In some respects the sex also made the magazine more genuinely literary. It introduced the same erotic preoccupations and four-letter words that serious books had discovered decades ago. It may have helped that they were placed within a New Yorker that never took its eyes off London. British topics and bylines were everywhere. One of the most clucked-over pieces in any recent issue, a profile of a dominatrix, was the work of a distinguished British resident, Paul Theroux. Maybe sex just seems more estimable in English surroundings.
But in its very obsession with glamour and celebrity, Brown's magazine was also surprisingly square. The old New Yorker prided itself on resisting hype. Brown, whose mother was once Laurence Olivier's press agent, loves the Next Big Thing without reservation. Her New Yorker took a place at the overcrowded table of weeklies and monthlies already chewing over the same movies and celebrities and titans of industry.