Tina Pooter's golden days
Kathy O'Shaughnessy
Life as a Party Tina Brown (Andre Deutsch £6.95)
Tatt-lere, as a Paris Match photographer called it, is the magazine Tina Brown brought to brilliant and shameless life when she took it over in 1979. It's the kind of journal that tells us about people like the Portanovas. 'Physically, they com- plemented one another perfectly'. Also, 'Ricky only drinks Dom Perignon'. This is the enthralling stuff of which Taller is made — all the right names, people and places. Tina Brown's book, Life as a Party, to which the general public is certainly not in- vited, is a compilation of her journalism.
Tina Brown renovated the Taller. The magazine was transformed from a 'dowdy dowager' into a 'delicious debutante'. Debs were in fact to occupy a more peripheral role, for inclusiveness was to be the order of the day. As the ex-editor declares generous- ly: 'I was going to let them all into the party — the debs and the Eurotrash, the sporting and the snorting. From now on the editorial was to mix the Queen Mother with April Ashley — and make sure both of them had a good time.' Naturally the Taller survived on its ability to turn anything (April Ashley or not) into an image that breathed ex- clusivity. Tina Brown's clever decision to let a more motley crowd decorate her pages didn't detract; it merely widened her scope. The perfect Taller photo became slightly more unorthodox: bare shoulders, black tie, taffeta, and the odd glimpse of some- one throwing up in the background to give it that particular je ne sais qua But the perfect Taller style was Tina Brown's own. She has a gift for the pithy and witty turn of phrase, an eye for give- away detail, an ear for amusing inflexions. Whatever the subject-matter, her talented prose rarely loses its poise. Miraculously, travelling from one celebrity to another (Princess Caroline of Monaco to Jerry Hall to Estee Lauder), she avoids being a bore. Her approach borders very tactfully on the satirical. Lady Anne, wife of Tennant, lives in a house overlooking 'a lake inhabited by serious geese'. Serge Gainsbourg emerges from his interview as a French melancholic, with a voice like Inspector Clouseau's: 'Where can you go now to have any fern?' And, disarmingly frank; 'My songs are rer- bish'. Tina Brown herself is not so frank. Her best journalism is parodic, parody that never quite becomes satire: and she treads a fine line between witty mockery and not-so- mocking promotion. The nearest she comes to satire is her rather brilliant Rosie Boot column. This was 'coverage' of eligible bat- chelors that damned very amusingly with pseudo-naive praise. Messrs. Oakes, Sum- mer, Shenkman, Guinness and others are assessed for their marriageable credentials. Each emerges as slightly ridiculous. Shenkman hisses ludicrously Byronic ex- clamations like Hell's Teeth! Summer travelled rough, enduring hardship 'for six- teen weeks with nothing between himself and starvation but an American Express card.' Mr Oakes didn't emerge too well ('Don't tell me you haven't met him yet') and there's a backhanded compliment for Mr Amis (the 'tiny ironist'). Generally the survey was sardonic enough to provoke phone-calls 'from ratty-voiced debs that began "Look I'd like to remain anonymous but I know this frightful shit you really ought to send Rosie Boot to interview" '.
Like Ann Barr and Peter York, authors of the horrendously prolonged and over- exposed Sloane Ranger saga, Tina Brown is perceptive and exceedingly funny on social mores. The Gentleman Hack is one of them, he who hates facts, who trots out in- stead a 'well-turned think-piece', who specialises in being journalistically 'cast against type' ('Hugo's very good on trees' re: his political column). His dress `tries to denote the aristocratic reach-me-down tradition' to make self-made man feel over- dressed. The High-Rent Henries provide another category; people who say predict- able things like 'Yes of course one's social life and family connections help sell houses. . . but it always happens, naturally' (thus Martin Elwes). These up-market estate agents radiate immoveable con- fidence. Tim Simmond, inspiration behind Mistral in Burnsall Street, confides to Tina over lunch: 'Everyone Pyoo-pyood the idea I could make a go of things alone.., which was virry virry silly of them' (as he's so chronically successful).
These generalised targets are fun to read but can go on too long. The onus is on style, which is irrepressibly lively. She takes good care that her less than enthralling sub- ject matter is not so dull as to have too many 'says'. People snort, chuckle, chorus, breeze, wail, but they don't often say. Nonetheless this kind of journalism wears virry virry thin after a while. Places and names are virry important and that gets a bit dull too. And when the style does flag — when the irony drops away — the result can be embarrassingly banal. Timothy Swallow discovers fame: 'It was the electric current he'd dreamed of and he couldn't wait to wire up and live'. Something a little wrong there.
The author christened her Tatler 'double- edged'; supposedly satirising Hi, Society as
well as perpetuating its myths. The more cryptic her observations, the more they swing back with neat irony. With a shrewd sense of humour Ms. Brown notes that the upper-class hostess is schizophrenic. She longs for her party to be photographed as long as she is seen to have put every obstacle in the way of doing so.
True, and it's also true to say that as long as Ms. Brown could inflect her ironies and direct the odd quizzical stare at the 'souped- up Henry set' the Tatler could blithely make those myths she has vague preten- sions to dispelling. The worst part of this book is the final chapter (whose title is the book's) on Timothy Swallow: party-goer par excellence and par excess, finally com- mitting suicide. Funeral mourners visited his nightclub haunts as a tribute. All very well, but what's Tina saying here? That it's all an empty cliche behind the glitter (yawn)? This doesn't need to be said by a Tatler editor. Like the upper-class hostess above, it's a little schizophrenic; a spurious gesture of seriousness that rings virry virry false.
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