Tina Brown’s New New Yorker: It’s More Than Vanity Fare

Throughout snootier Manhattan nooks, the familiar sound of the New Yorker magazine plopping through mail slots this week has been followed by another distinct refrain: Aaaarrrggghh!

The new issue, after all, marks the premiere of Tina Brown as editor of America’s most prestigious journal and, it has been suggested, the long-dreaded arrival of cultural Armageddon.

Right?

Well. . . .

New Yorker loyalists who manage to pick themselves up off the floor and actually open the magazine are unlikely to recoil in disgust or horror. Mild disorientation is more like it.

In any other magazine, most readers probably wouldn’t notice Brown’s abrupt redesign. New Yorker devotees, however, will immediately sense that change is at hand. And the subtle transformation becomes apparent with the cover.

As Vanity Fair editor, Brown had a penchant for splashing celebrities, sometimes in shocking poses, on the cover. Wags warned that Brown would soon have Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker’s monocled mascot, posing nude or pregnant.

Instead, Brown’s first cover is a drawing by longtime New Yorker cartoonist Edward Sorel, which depicts a Central Park surrey carrying a scowling, pink-haired punk.

The image supports Brown’s stated intention to return to the style of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder, who tempered erudition with a touch of attitude.

The image is eye-catching, but it would not have been unthinkable under departed editor Robert Gottlieb. In fact, only the most self-sure New Yorker-phile will be able to separate every “Tinafication” from tradition.

Among the more striking changes is the new cover logo, which is shaded to stand out against the background. It looks good.

Also, the sacred Talk of the Town feature has been split into two parts.

The Talk section, at its best, was like a leisurely stroll through Central Park: Usually pleasant and invigorating but occasionally arrhythmic, as when masters Joan Didion and John McPhee anonymously practiced their craft on whatever subject engaged them.

Brown’s first “Talk” falls short. A piece on an HIV-positive New York Times reporter hits its mark. But other items are undistinguished, and the lead profile of director Pedro Almodovar is self-consciously chatty and gushy in the manner of certain Vanity fare.

The Comment column, which precedes “Talk,” will be edited and occasionally written by Hendrik Hertzberg, who wrote for the New Yorker in the William Shawn era and went on to craft speeches for President Jimmy Carter.

He was editing the New Republic when Brown tapped him for the executive editor position.

Hertzberg says Comment will be “the voice of the magazine.”

That voice is pitch perfect in the first column, in which Hertzberg vetoes President Bush’s proposal to let citizens designate up to 10% of their tax payments for deficit reduction. The plan, Hertzberg writes, “would import the principle of one dollar, one vote directly into the heart of a system based on the principle of one person, one vote.”

Other changes: Writers will appreciate that their names now appear at the top of articles, rather than at the end. A new “50 Years Ago at the New Yorker” box will replay past glories, and heavier paper makes color cartoons and illustrations possible.

That advantage is evidenced by a clever two-page Jules Feiffer cartoon exploring the proper male response to the Mia-Woody issue.

It’s not just heavier stock that has fattened the magazine, though. This issue is packed with 85 pages of ads, compared to the magazine’s recent 35-page average.

Another change: A new table of contents finally deigns to give readers a few hints about what the articles and departments are about.

The first Brown issue offers a solid mix of fiction, columns, reportage and poetry by writers and reviewers old and new. (Rather than the Michael Ovitz or Madonna puff pieces some skeptics had feared.)

Although one of Brown’s first dictates was that the magazine’s notoriously long articles shrink, Hertzberg echoes Brown’s assurance that the mix will include articles of all shapes and sizes:

”. . . There will still be the odd humongous (article), but gradually the lengths are going to get shorter.”

At least one man in America probably wishes that Brown had abandoned the mega-length article altogether. Vice President Dan Quayle can’t be thrilled by this issue’s whopping page-turner, which discusses his alleged drug use in law school and the convoluted consequences that have befallen his prime accuser, Brett Kimberlin.

The story--which rolls over 25 pages, past seven little black-and-white drawings, two poems, one color cartoon, and 13 black-and-white cartoons (five funny, five droll, three stupid)--reaches no clear conclusion.

Did Dan Quayle buy pot from Kimberlin? There’s no corroborating evidence, and no prosecutor would have indicted Quayle based on Kimberlin’s testimony alone.

Did the Bush-Quayle campaign pull strings to silence Kimberlin before the 1988 election? Yes, writer Mark Singer strongly suggests. Is the convicted felon doing extra time for political reasons? Maybe.

About halfway through the article, Singer quotes former “60 Minutes” producer Norman Goren on why the story about Quayle’s alleged pot-smoking fell through at CBS four years ago:

“The Kimberlin story had too many subtleties,” Goren said, “And we didn’t do stories that had too many subtleties.”

Indeed, subtlety is not what “60 Minutes” can, or necessarily should, do. It’s not what 99% of magazines do.

Thankfully it’s something that will still be done--at least on occasion--at the New Yorker.

More tinkering is to come in the weeks ahead. But Hertzberg, for one, is confident that the transformation will prove bracing rather than overwhelming: “The most shocking thing is how the reader can feel so comfortable with so many changes. I think these changes look as if they evolved. Even though they happened all of a sudden, they look organic, they look like they grew there.”

Readers who disagree at least have this consolation: In what may prove the most significant change of all, after 67 years on the news stands, the magazine has accepted and printed its first letter to the editor.

REQUIRED READING

* Magazinedom is well-represented in a catalogue of the cultural elite that hit the stands this week: “The Newsweek 100” in Newsweek.

Aside from Tina and S. I. Newhouse Jr., who pays her, the list includes William F. Buckley Jr. (National Review), Andrew Sullivan (New Republic), Michelangelo Signorile (the Advocate), Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone, US,), George F. Will (Newsweek), Garry Wills (New York Review of Books) Entertainment Weekly and National Lampoon. The also-rans include Steve Brill (American Lawyer), Christopher Whittle (those big Doctor’s office special interest magazines), Graydon Carter (Tina’s replacement at Vanity Fair) and Randall Kennedy (Reconstruction).

MAGAZINE VS. MAGAZINE

From morning till midnight, it seems, some cultural elitist is sneering at Martha Stewart, of home-decorating magazine and how-to book fame. From Katie Couric of the “Today Show” to David Letterman of “Late Night,” they snigger at her obsession with just-so salmon souffles and frilly flower arrangements. Even lowly magazine columnists have been known to sneer.

The October Lear’s offers a passionate and well-reasoned defense of Stewart that should shame all critics. Stewart’s success as a businesswoman, says Benjamin DeMott, stems from her role as an exemplar of excellence:

“Stewart is not restoring an old hierarchy, isn’t placing home and hearth above career and power. She’s saying that many of us choose both, and that every choice, in every world, carries with it an obligation to live by standards.”

NEWSSTAND NEWS

Writers tend to have love-hate relationships with editors.

It was different with Bob LaBrasca, 49, the executive editor of L.A. Style, who died last Wednesday of a heart attack while on vacation in Manhattan with his wife, Tara Fass, and their daughter, Jana.

LaBrasca joined the magazine soon after its 1985 launch and promptly became a guiding force. He shaped, in whole or part, many of its most notable successes, including award-winning special issues on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, Latin Los Angeles and an issue that explored Los Angeles’s link to the ocean.

“Writers of differing sensibilities and styles regarded him as the finest line editor they’d worked with,” says Jeffrey Hirsch, the magazine’s managing editor.

One of those writers said: “He was the last real magazine editor in L.A.”