Talk magazine was gunned down — but was there more than one assassin?
FRANK JOHNSON
Everyone of my generation remembers where they were when they first heard of the assassination of Talk.
We admirers of the magazine who live in Britain were, of course, asleep. This was not just because some of us were reading it. Those of our family and neighbours who were awake roused us to tell us the terrible news. We hurried to the television screen. For days it was dominated by nothing else. Sky and CNN had correspondents stationed outside Tina Brown's apartment, gym. analyst, hairdresser, manicurist, children, husband, dentist, personal biotechnologist, agent, trainer and dietitian; as well as with each of the magazine's readers. But, as so often on big international stories, it was the BBC that rose best to the occasion.
Over and over again, the screen showed the harrowing moment when the assassin. Weinstein, fired the fatal shot. Miss Brown is cut down, as. more to the point, are Weinstein's losses. Miss Brown screams. Police rush to stop the rest of Manhattan cheering. Jerkily, the camera follows the stricken magazine as it is rushed to the hospital. Doctors open it up in a last, desperate attempt to find an unpredictable article. But no. Somehow everyone present knows that there isn't one. Talk is pronounced dead.
Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy — and now Talk, hope of my generation. Sometimes it is hard to be pro-American. Must the great republic always devour her children, as well as Miss Brown her Caesar salads?
Ever since it happened, the biggest of the unanswered questions about the Talk assassination has haunted us all. Did Weinstein act alone? Was there a second assassin? Certainly, it is convenient for the CIA, the Washington establishment and the American militaryindustrial complex to want us to believe that Weinstein was the sole assassin He fits the classic assassin's profile: a crazed loner with a pathological hatred of losing money. In the end, Miss Brown came to symbolise and personify that fear. We shall never know why. With this one act, he has won himself a place in history. Otherwise he would have been just another anonymous film mogul in the Los Angeles crowd. But could Weinstein have killed without help?
Miss Brown, in many interviews since it happened, has blamed the assassination on the fall in luxury-goods advertising since 11 September. That makes sense, and points to what some of us always suspected: Weinstein is an al-Qa'eda agent. Bin Laden was aiming at Talk all along, but had to settle for the twin towers because, before 11 September, luxurygoods advertising was holding up.
But Mr Michael Wolf, an expert on the American media writing about the assassination in the current issue of New York magazine, says. 'You could fairly say that Talk magazine has been destined to close since its second issue was published two years ago.' Mr Wolf is obviously part of the establishment cover-up. Mr Wolf also says that one of the reasons for the assassination was Miss Brown's 'amazing out-of-it-ness'. He implies that the celebrities she wanted to write about were out of it.
But to my generation that was Talk's attraction. We have never heard of the latest celebrities. We read Talk because of its irresistible headlines: 'The Real Buster Keaton', 'Why The Talkies Won't Last', 'Is FDR The New Grover Cleveland?'. 'Gary Cooper Tells It Like It Was'. For us readers, as Miss Brown put it, out was the new in.
Who shall ever forget the 24-hour coverage of Talk's launch party. It was held on top of Mount Rushmore. The A-list guests abseiled to and from the occasion, up and down George Washington's nose. As for that list, think Hollywood and Henry Kissinger meet organised crime. Everyone who was anyone in American history was there: Alexander Hamilton, Robert E. Lee, Al Capone, Ezra Pound. Liz Hurley. It may be objected: she's not American! No, but subject to DNA confirmation her child's father is. To Miss Brown, that makes her an American historical figure.
Mr Wolf, in the aforementioned article, scoffed, 'The magazine had two big-buzz, we're-so-cool parties in its final weeks.' But that is to miss the point of Talk. It was a party with a magazine stuck on. Now, as Miss Brown would put it, with her genius for the expected phrase, the party's over.
The Prime Minister, especially since his Brighton speech in the autumn, has been likened to Gladstone. He believes that Britain should do her best wherever she can to make liberalism prevail across the world. It is a good analogy. A GuardianlICM poll this week had Mr Blair leading Mr Duncan Smith by 51 per cent to 14 per cent. This, despite the government's troubles concerning health and transport.
This suggests a different analogy. No prime minister has enjoyed so lasting an ascendancy over a Conservative opposition since Palmerston between 1859 and 1865. And the reason is perhaps the same. Both were right-wing enough not to make voters want anyone further to the Right. In particular, Palmerston, like Mr Blair, was prepared to bomb foreigners against whom he had taken. The Tory opposition was left with few songs to sing. Disraeli, who was trying to organise that opposition in the Commons, described Palmerston as 'the Tory chief of a radical Cabinet'. Another Tory, Salisbury, said that Palmerston wanted 'radical votes, Whig placemen, and Tory policy'.
Mr Blair does not need all that many radical votes. He is happy for them to go to the Liberal Democrats. He holds office because of the defection to him, in 1997, of much of the Tory vote. He prefers Whig placemen. Figures such as Lord Birt are the nearest we have to Whigs: magnificoes prepared to preserve the position of their class — the mediamanagerial — by allying with the dominant political force of the day; once Lady Thatcher, then Mr Major, now Mr Blair. Unlike the old Whigs, Lord Birt may not have come to Mr Blair from a grand house, but he undoubtedly came from a grand salary. It follows, because of the nature of his support in the country, that Mr Blair should prefer Tory policies. The latest is his attempt to involve private enterprise in the NHS.
The mid-19th-century Conservatives did not revive until Palmerston was gone. It became easier for them to attack, from the Right, Palmerston's immediate successor, Russell, and his more lasting one, Gladstone, who was reluctant to bomb foreigners, or at least claimed to be. Gladstone was the exchancellor with whom Palmerston had an uneasy relationship. In 1874 the Tories defeated him at a general election, and Disraeli became prime minister for seven years. The Tories' present hope, then, is that Gladstone was the Gordon Brown of his day.
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