Babylon Revisited

It took an upstart editor from London to rescue Vanity Fair and make it an American phenomenon. Tina Brown looks back at the roaring eighties in her newly published diaries.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1984

I have a rush of desire to live somewhere modern. I had always imagined myself living in a New Yorker–y brownstone walk-up, but I am over old-world touches. I want to be the opposite of who I was in London. I want to live in a glass box with white sofas that looks down on the electric throb of New York. I am so dying to get out of the Algonquin, with its sleepy switchboard and jostling lobby, that I pick the first apartment the agent sends me, a sublet in a black glass tower with curved corners at the northwest corner of Second Avenue and Sixty-Sixth Street.

Harry came in from London, and we met the real estate agent in the lobby on my lunch hour. The agent wore a porkpie hat very straight on his head and a raincoat. The sublet he showed us in the Solow Tower (as it’s called) is somewhat preposterous. An over furnished glitz bowl with Ultrasuede pillars and fairy lights in the rubber plants. Two beds, two bathrooms. I have never seen a bedside table crammed with so many speaking alarm clocks and whirring coffee machines and Fabergé pill pots. Still, the selling point for me is the enormous health club on the top floor with a skylit swimming pool surrounded by windows, where you can gaze out on the glamour and the glitter of the spires below. And we only took it for six months.

The owner is a Blanche DuBois blonde I’ll call Mrs. de Voff. When she opened the door, she was wearing a negligee, which she kept unbuttoning to show her new silicone breasts.

“I am very proud to be renting your apartment, Mrs. de Voff,” I said.