TALK OF THE TOWN

Tina Brown's latest two-month-old magazine is on the skids, says Toby Young New York WITHIN the New York media, there's only one topic of conversation these days: the plummeting fortunes of talk, Tina Brown's new magazine. It scarcely seems possible, but only two months after its launch the vultures are already circling. This is in spite of the fact that the first issue sold so well — according to Tina Brown, anyway — that an extra 300,000 copies had to be printed. 'I'm very shocked at how quickly it's unravelling,' says one disillusioned writer. 'Tina's in a state of total meltdown.'

Much of this is attributable to wishful thinking. Since arriving in New York in 1984, Tina Brown has inspired a great deal of jealousy. She was only 30 when she became the editor of Vanity Fair and 38 when she took the helm of the New Yorker, the pinnacle of American joumalism. The fact that she was British only added insult to injury. 'I'm sure there are people out there who won't be happy until they see Tina crawl on broken glass,' laughs Jesse Kornbluth, the editorial director of AOL. 'I'm not one of them.'

Yet the speculation isn't completely unfounded, talk is jointly owned by Mira- max and Hearst Communications, and relations between Tina Brown and Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax, are reported to be strained. The much- vaunted 'synergy', whereby talk was going to publish stories that Miramax could turn into films, has failed to materialise. In the three issues that have appeared so far, only one article has been optioned by the stu- dio. The problem, apparently, is that Wein- stein takes very little interest in talk's predominantly highbrow subject-matter. 'Harvey doesn't read books,' Tina com- plained to one contributor. 'The only things he reads are movie treatments.'

For his part, the Miramax co-chairman is said to be aghast at the magazine's spi- ralling costs. In Hollywood Weinstein enjoys a reputation for being incredibly tight-fisted and he has repeatedly refused Tina's requests for more money. One of his few public comments about talk was to boast that he had recouped the cost of the launch party by selling the television rights

to a cable station. 'Harvey's unhappy that he ever got involved with it,' reports one Hollywood insider.

Then there's the issue of talk's incredibly shrinking staff. Since its launch, talk has been beset by a series of high-level resigna- tions culminating last week in the depar- ture of the managing editor and the production director. To lose one senior member of staff may be regarded as a mis- fortune; to lose two in the course of a week looks like carelessness. So far, three senior editors have tendered their resignations and none of them has been replaced. 'I think she's getting desperate,' reports an editor at a rival magazine whom Tina has tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit. 'Three positions is a lot of positions to fill.' The problem, apparently, is that she's a very demanding boss.

Tina's modus operandi is to commission far more articles than she needs to fill the magazine each month and then leave the decision as to which ones to include until the very last minute. This means every arti- cle has to be in perfect shape, placing an enormous strain on her staff. As the dead- line for each issue approaches, she rarely

More Toty party in-fighting!

leaves the office before midnight and she expects her minions to be equally dedicat- ed. 'I remember that for one stretch of four months I was never home before the end of the 11 o'clock news,' recalls Chip McGrath, who served as deputy editor of the New Yorker under Tina. 'It was insane at times but it was also exciting.'

In this atmosphere, Tina's nerves often become frayed and she ends up abusing her employees. In the run-up to the all- important first issue of talk, senior editor Sam Sifton became so stressed-out he repeatedly vomited in the office. Indeed, Tina treated her staff at the New Yorker an badly that one editor was shocked to see people crying when she left the magazine last year. 'They were suffering from Stock- holm Syndrome,' jokes Daniel Menaker, the New Yorker's fiction editor from 1992 until 1994. 'They had begun to love their captor. They were grieving at the departure of their tormentor.'

Of course, working for the most famous magazine editor in the world does have its compensations. John Heilpern, now the theatre critic of the New York Observer but once a commissioning editor at Vanity Fair, has been dining out on the following anec- dote for years. In 1985 Tina asked him to commission a short story for the Christmas issue — this was when Vanity Fair still thought of itself as a literary magazine — and he persuaded Isaac Bashevis Singer to write one. He handed it over and a few days later it came back to him with the words 'Beef it up, Singer' scrawled on the title page in big, red letters. 'I had to gently explain to Tina,' says Heilpern, 'that "Beef it up, Singer" was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.'

Not surprisingly, Tina Brown completely dismisses any suggestion that talk is in trou- ble, attributing the staff defections to rou- tine teething problems. 'Most magazine launches in the first six months have more people vanishing than Idi Amin's Cabinet,' she told the New York Post last Friday. This was vintage Tina, breezily comparing her- self to the murderous Ugandan dictator as a way of letting her critics know she's untroubled by depictions of her as a heart- less tyrant. At the New Yorker she was known as 'Stalin in high heels', a nickname in which she took some pride.

It would be rash to count Tina out just yet, even if she has suffered a few blows.

Her biggest problem is that, in the absence of the 'synergy' that was going to be talk's defining characteristic, it is not clear what kind of magazine it's supposed to be. In the past, she's managed to persuade her staff to work 16 hours a day by turning her pro-

jects into causes, but in order to do that she's going to have to provide talk with an

identity it currently lacks. 'It's kind of

mixed up,' says Walter Kim, a writer who signed-up with talk as a columnist but left

before the first issue appeared. 'It's not quite the pure gust of commercialism I was expecting, but it's not anything else either.'