TINA BROWN : THE MAGIC OF HIGH STYLE

There is so much undiluted undisguised assurance in the room where Tina Brown works that “power seating” is unnecessary--the editor in chief of Vanity Fair works on a table she designed in the shape of an apostrophe. So it really doesn’t matter who sits where. Because Tina Brown is sitting at the figurative head of the table, anyway.

The Times of London calls her the highest-profile editor in New York. But Tina Brown is after more than Faux Glitz. “High style and performance” are the qualities that obsess her. Probably not since Clare Booth Luce, her predecessor, has Manhattan seen such an outrageously ambitious don’t-hold-the-Poupon would-be arbiter of taste. “Am I a missionary of high style?” she asked aloud. The question is rhetorical. Visionary might be the better word.

In terms of media heat right now, it’s two words: Tina Brown (or Vanity Fair, as the names are interchangeable). Why Brown? Because she unlocked America’s secret passion for the rich. Because she has an outsider’s fix on the new money now in power. And because she’s come into her own. She’s overseen the kind of dual rush her boss Si Newhouse prayed for: Circulation and advertising at Vanity Fair are up--though the magazine that’s read is still in the red.

“I believe in life imitating a magazine,” says Brown, matter-of-factly. “I believe in the pure silk gliding fantasy that was Marlene Dietrich in 1937. Is it an untrue image? Sure. But if it took Dietrich four hours to look that way, so what? Ravish and polish are what I’m talking about, and what I’m aiming for. I’m bored with these suppressed style snobs who say it’s brave for an actress to play a bag lady. I say, ‘Forget the bag lady! How about being brave and looking like Dietrich?’ Glamour is something celebrities now need to be given.”

And if you listen closely to Tina Brown you believe they--and we--are about to be given it, in spades. This Oxford-graduated daughter of English movie producer George Brown (the Agatha Christie pictures starring Margaret Rutherford) has picked up on “America’s fascination with the very rich in the Reagan Era. That’s why I put the Reagans on the cover of the magazine. But the Reagans were the tip of an iceberg, I believe. This frenzy with the rich won’t continue; the pretentiousness of social life in the ‘80s will subside. Replacing that will be privileged men and women recharging the landscape. The new rich are the new American stars. They’ve come up the hard way, through ruthlessness and nerves, but they are much less tedious than people who inherited wealth.”

But is money necessarily equated with taste? Doesn’t Tina Brown also bite the hands that read her? “Yes, but for us to be anti-rich would be dumb,” she said, with logic. “Town and Country is for the stinking rich, I always say, and we are for the thinking rich. . . . Before I lived in America I didn’t believe women existed like you have on ‘Dynasty.’ Women with coiffed hair and manicured nails who run steel-pipe companies. Then I met these women in New York. They have names like Trump and Steinberg and Helmsley and Taubman. Parking lots created their fortunes. But they are as gorgeous as the women on ‘Dynasty.’ ”

Brown, an editor-writer-wife-mother, is kind of a Wunderkind who knows taste is discovery: before turning 30 she published two books and had two plays produced. At the magazine she regrets only one cover in her 36-month reign, that of Sean Penn. “He just didn’t belong. It was an experiment, but it didn’t represent Vanity Fair; it represented Sean Penn’s whim about being a bad boy, a boy out of control.” Brown’s attitude about style also being “a matter of control” is reflected in her personal preferences.

Hollywood is not among them. “The magic spot for me was New York,” she said with a wistfulness and a pause. “Hollywood had no romance for me because I grew up practically in the lap of Margaret Rutherford, and people like her. I saw nightmare egos all day long in the movie business, and I wanted no part of it. By control and the abuse of it I’m talking about people like Jessica Lange. What she has is too much control in wrong ways. If Jessica Lange goes on choosing her own scripts, she won’t be making that many more movies. She chooses scripts to fit her ego.”

The former editor of England’s Tatler took over that magazine (and re-invented snobbery in London) the same month Mrs. Thatcher took over No. 10 Downing Street. Brown does the legwork to back up her hunches. Her star writer Dominick Dunne was a bereaved father about to observe the murder trial of his daughter Dominique when Brown convinced him to keep a diary--as she herself has done for years. Dunne’s diary became the first of his Vanity Fair pieces, all of which have just been published by Crown as the collection “Fatal Charms.”

Ask Brown of her tastes and, in true journalist-chameleon style, she might tell you yours . She’s a monitor, in a sense, or a beacon of where to go, what to see, what to read, etc. Books? “The best-selling novel ‘Perfume’ I read on my last holiday, a two-week visit to Tuscany. Gelsey Kirkland’s ‘Dancing on My Grave’ got to me. It lifted the lid off the dance world for me.”

Writers? “I would turn first to our writer James Wolcott, even if I wasn’t the editor of the magazine.” Places to go? “Steve Rubell’s next place is going to be a black-tie supper club! How do you like that? It won’t be a meat market like the Palladium, which was invented for the early ‘80s. The late ‘80s will be very elegant.”

Inspirations? “Two people come to mind. Bob Hughes (Time magazine’s art critic) is a reservoir of strength. One lunch gives you 1,000 ideas, thoughts, dreams. Conde-Nast editorial director Alex Liberman is a well I can dip into. He’s been here forever, and his questions keep me questioning myself.”

But then comes the tough question--the answer will affect writers, editors, publicists, readers--and careers. Of the current crop, which stars (or just plain people) are to Tina Brown’s taste? “Madonna right now because she’s doing a Jean Seberg kind of thing. A year ago she didn’t interest me and a year from now she may not again. . . . Anjelica Huston interests me because she looks the way people want to look. Sade, ditto. Klaus Maria Brandauer. Isabelle Adjani. . . . Hmmm, the list is not so long, is it?”

Well, then, how about Cybill Shepherd? “Yes, if she looks the way she looked in the November Interview.” Steven Spielberg? “I’m not sure about him for our cover. His movies have not been my favorite films. They are not narrative enough for my taste. . . . Misha (Baryshnikov) is stylish, and I think Bianca Jagger is a role model for looking the way she does. David Bowie and Diane Keaton have kept something authentic about their appearance. Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy don’t dis interest me. They just must look wonderful. Nobody is famous enough to look ratty anymore.”

But who has she left out? “Oh, don’t forget Lady Di,” added the editor who resembles the Lady, and has written about her both favorably and unfavorably. What about Lady Di now? “Well, she has proved herself a high performer with style. And she has magic!” Tina Brown means every word when she adds, without even a pause, “I’m a great believer in magic.”