two Tinas

 

Tina Brown

--------------------- [excerpt from The Vanity Fair Diaries, by Tina Brown] ------------------------------- I thought he was going to ask me to write Estée's biography.  (Such a great story of striving émigré hardship, but they would never let the true one be told.)  

Then I suddenly realized he was wooing me to join the Lauder company.  He mentioned "heading up their British branch" or suggesting to them a company they might buy and I could run.  

        "If, for example, Burberry were to be on sale, we'd be interested in that," he said.  

I was incredulous.  

I am a journalist.  I wouldn't have a clue about how to run a chain of shops that specializes in raincoats.  In America, success in one field seems to make people think you can do anything.  Maybe I will be offered a job as a brain surgeon next.

 -------------------------- [end, excerpt]

I listened to several You Tube videos where author and journalist Tina Brown was interviewed, and I began to get interested in reading more of her books -- The Vanity Fair Diaries!  The Palace Papers!  Also, I started thinking about -- magazines.

        In one of the interviews Ms. Brown described putting together a magazine -- the subject matter, the photographs, the typeface, the layout, the mixture of "high and low" culture and art.  

How one item leads you to notice the next one - somewhat similar, somewhat different...  It's kind of like listening, in the Amazon Prime series American Playboy, to Hugh Hefner and some of his collaborators discuss magazining (if that's a word)....  I found it interesting.

Now that the Internet has seriously dented if not nearly destroyed the business of print magazines -- we might start to miss them.

        This made me think of a wonderful documentary about Tina Turner, called The Girl from Nutbush (1992).  In her growing up years, Anna Mae Bullock (Tina) in rural Tennessee found magazines, when available, to be a sort of connection to a larger world -- one of variety and modernity.

        She speaks in the film with such energy and enthusiasm, her voice containing an excited smile -- I can never forget how she tells the interviewer about her youthful curiosity about clothes and hairstyles -- she says, "Models in magazines were always cutting their hair, or doing their hair.  Fashion!  It was fashion in those days, even though we didn't have magazines.  It was something I was interested in -- a kind of beauty!"

When she references the magazines but then says "even though we didn't have magazines" I took that to mean the magazines were hard to come by.  Maybe you could buy one once in a while, or peruse one at someone else's house, if it was there, or in a display rack at the drugstore....

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