Tina Brown
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tina Brown, Lady Evans (born Christina Hambley Brown on November 21, 1953, in Maidenhead, England) is a British-born American magazine editor, columnist, and talk-show host. As the editor of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, she reversed the venerable magazine's declining fortunes.
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[edit] Childhood
She and her older brother, Christopher Hambley Brown, grew up in Little Marlow, in Buckinghamshire on the outskirts of London. Her parents, George Hambley Brown and Bettina Iris Mary (Kohr) Brown were prominent figures in the British film industry. George produced the first Agatha Christie films starring Margaret Rutherford as Jane Marple. His other films included The Chiltern Hundreds (1949); Hotel Sahara (1951), starring Yvonne De Carlo; Guns at Batasi (1964), starring Richard Attenborough and Mia Farrow; and Terror Under the House (1971), starring Joan Collins.
In 1939 George had been briefly married to a 17-year old Irishwoman who would later become actress Maureen O'Hara. The couple had their marriage annulled. He later met Bettina Kohr, who was Laurence Olivier's press agent. In her later years, Bettina worked as a gossip columnist for an English-language magazine for expatriates in Spain, where she and George lived in retirement.
Brown was a rebellious adolescent. She was expelled from three boarding schools; in her words, she was expelled from one because she "organized protests because we weren't allowed to change our underpants," and another "where I had described (the headmistress's) bosom as an unidentified flying object."[1]
Brown went to college at the prestigious St Anne's College, Oxford. Before graduating in 1974 she won the 1973 Sunday Times Drama Award for her one-act play Under the Bamboo Tree. A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, was mounted at a small theatre in London in 1977. She also wrote for Isis, the university literary magazine, to which she contributed interviews with the columnist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore. She ended up dating both men. Her relationship with Waugh served as a great boost to her writing career, as he used his influence to get attention drawn to her. At this time in the mid '70s she also dated the writer Martin Amis.
[edit] Career as a journalist
In 1973 she won the Pakenham Award for the best young journalist. The Sunday Times called her the Most Promising Female Journalist, and in March of 1974, the British edition of Cosmopolitan magazine described her as a "stunning twenty-year-old playwright." (Her photo was shown next to that of a young Arianna Huffington, who was then a Cambridge graduate known as Arianna Stassinopoulos. The women became lifelong friends.) In this period, Brown wrote a regular column for Punch magazine.
She met Harold Evans in 1974, and began working for his Sunday Times as a writer. She reported from New York for the paper and its color magazine, then quit to join The Sunday Telegraph in London when she and Evans fell in love. Evans and his wife, Enid Evans, a school-teacher and magistrate, were divorced in 1978. Evans and Brown were married in East Hampton, New York at the home of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn on August 20, 1981.
[edit] Editing career
[edit] Early years
Brown became editor of Tatler in June 1979 at the invitation of its new owner, the Australian millionaire Gary Bogard; in a short time she quadrupled its circulation to 40,000. In 1982 S. I. ("Si") Newhouse Jr., owner of Condé Nast Publications, bought the magazine, and in 1983 it was voted England's Magazine of the Year.
After leaving Tatler she was hired in May 1983 as an editorial adviser to Vanity Fair in New York, initially for six weeks. She stayed on as a contributing editor for a brief time, and then was named editor-in-chief on January 1, 1984. Her restructuring of the magazine debuted with the April 1984 issue, featuring actress Daryl Hannah on the cover. She brought in Dominick Dunne as a writer on crime and Helmut Dunne as a daring photographer. The magazine's readership began to grow in 1985, and the magazine eventually became a tremendous success both in circulation and profit. She took the sales from around 200,000 to more than a million with a mix of celebrity interviews, serious foreign affairs specials, columnists and photography. She persuaded the novelist William Styron to write about his depression under the title Darkness Visible, which subsequently became a best-selling nonfiction book.
[edit] New Yorker
In 1992, she accepted the company's invitation to become editor of The New Yorker. She redesigned the magazine, introducing the first staff photographer (Richard Avedon) and brought in many new reporters and critics, including Rick Hertzberg, Simon Schama, Jeffrey Toobin, Anthony Lane, Malcolm Gladwell and the man she eventually nominated as her successor, David Remnick, then a reporter with the Washington Post. She retained long-time writers like John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill and Philip Hamburger, but go over the years let 50 go, who became her critics, and recruited 40 new writers. A few of her moves, especially challenging topical covers by Art Spiegelman, attracted criticism, but the effect of her efforts was to add 250,000 new readers and reinvigorate the magazine. In 1998, she resigned from the New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (owned by the Disney Company) to be the chairman in a new multi-media company they intended to start with a new magazine, a book company and a television show. The Hearst company came in as partners with Miramax.
[edit] Talk Magazine
Tina Brown created Talk magazine, a monthly glossy, and appointed Jonathan Burnham and Susan Mercandetti to manage Talk Books. Both magazine and book company made an immediate impact, the magazine with a circulation around 800,000 and the book company with a number of best sellers (including the memoir of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani). Three years after the launch the magazine was on track to viability, with rising circulation and advertising revenues, but the company was badly damaged in the advertising recession after the 9/11 terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center. Publication was suspended soon afterward and Talk Books was absorbed into Miramax.
[edit] Recent work
Tina Brown went on to produce a series of specials for CNBC that followed up by signing her to host a well-received weekly talk show of politics and culture titled Topic [A] With Tina Brown, with guests ranging from leaders such as Prime Minister Tony Blair and Senator John McCain to celebrities such as George Clooney and Annette Bening. She also wrote a biting column on politics and culture for The Washington Post and the New York Sun newspaper, but took book leave in 2005 to accept a major book contract with Random House on the legacy of the Princess of Wales. She lives in New York City with her husband, Sir Harold Evans, and two children.
[edit] Bibliography
- Life as a Party (1984) ISBN 0-233-97600-0
- Loose Talk (1979) ISBN 0-7181-1833-2
[edit] Sources
- Biography:Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power (2001) ISBN 0-684-83763-3
- ^ David Wallechinsky & Amy Wallace: The New Book of Lists, p.10. Canongate, 2005. ISBN 1-84195-719-4.
