In the months since Tina Brown, <i> wunderkind</i> editor of hip, kicky Vanity Fair, took over the hallowed New Yorker, she has proven every bit as controversial as predicted--and she remains . . . : The Talk of the Town

The New Yorker would have spun this story slowly, allowing its intricately interwoven themes of hubris and cultural entropy to emerge in a subtle six-part series.

Vanity Fair would have blurted it out like a high concept movie-of-the-week.

Or better yet, a new sitcom.

Here’s the pitch: Hip and headstrong editor Tina Brown runs Vanity Fair, a smashingly successful magazine that dishes glitz, fame and glamour-- biff-bam-boom!

The New Yorker is Vanity Fair’s antithesis: quiet, refined and disdainful of the corrupting pop cultural fray.

So when media mogul S. I. Newhouse persuades the very British Brown to leave Vanity Fair and take over America’s snootiest weekly, the stage is set for personality conflict, culture clash and a classic war of wills.

Boffo boob-tube, right?

Yeah . . . well . . . there are a couple small problems.

For one, a recent tour of the legendary New Yorker offices suggests that the institution may not have been quite as entrenched in tradition as some purists pretend.

And Brown doesn’t entirely fit her typecast.

Which is not to say that the Brown-New Yorker merger isn’t a ripping good yarn.

By the six-month anniversary of her arrival at the magazine, in fact, Brown was receiving more press attention than that other blonde Vanity Fair gave mainstream cachet in the 1980s: Madonna.

And, in some circles, stirring more debate.

Brown’s admirers tend to exhibit all the restraint of the Vancouver Sun columnist who gushed, “Her name is Tina Brown and I think I love her.” They call her the salvation of an increasingly lackluster relic.

Her detractors assert equal and opposite force.

As New Yorker veteran Garrison Keillor, who declined to work with Brown, told the Columbia Journalism Review: “I left because I love the New Yorker and because she is the wrong person to edit it. . . . Ms. Brown, like so many Brits, seems most fascinated by the passing carnival and celebrity show in America. . . . She has redesigned it into a magazine that looks and reads an awful lot like a hundred other magazines.”

To Brown’s way of thinking, Brown-bashers are simplistic at best, sexist at worst. And star-struck Tina-philes miss the point.

Folks figured they’d gleaned her one true self from the pages of Vanity Fair, she says. And then they fretted, “Would this thing they had decided was me be in the New Yorker?”

“One reason I did the New Yorker,” she says in a lickety-split British lilt that remains soft-edged even when her blue eyes spark, “was to prove that I’m an editor that can do many kinds of publications.”

*

In an analysis in last month’s Columbia Journalism Review, Eric Utne, editor of the Utne Reader, laments that Brown has essentially remade the New Yorker into Vanity Fair’s image: a “weekly epistle for America’s new orthodoxy--the cult of personality.”

Cynics see Brown as the Madonna of magazinedom, and figure she’ll soon have Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker’s monocled mascot, in bondage.

Brown is not particularly amused, nor annoyed, by a comparison between herself and the fame- and power-hungry material girl.

“I don’t like Madonna particularly . . . “ Brown says, as she sits in her large office on the 17th floor of the New Yorker’s 20 W. 43rd St. address.

“I mean, she’s fine. (But) she was just something to sell magazines. That’s what she was doing in Vanity Fair. . . . I don’t feel a particular need to write about her any more.”

Nor, Brown says politely, does she think anyone need waste more ink writing about “Tina Brown and her life and times.”

Protests aside, her life is at least as interesting as most Vanity Fair profiles.

Brown, 39, was born in Buckinghamshire, England. Her father produced movies, including the Agatha Christie mystery films, and her mother was Sir Laurence Olivier’s personal assistant.

Brown managed to get herself expelled from boarding school, she says, by writing a play that featured some “iconoclastic” jokes about the headmistress. That small setback aside, she received her MA in English from Oxford University’s St. Anne’s College, where she wrote for the campus magazine and authored plays.

In 1974, Brown wrote a series of articles about the American women’s movement for the London Times. Harold Evans, the Times’ editor, took notice. In 1981, Brown and Evans married at the home of writer Sally Quinn and her husband, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Evans and Brown have two children, George, 7, and Isabelle, 2.

Rupert Murdoch bought the Times in early 1981 and fired Evans, who went on to become editorial director of U.S. News & World Report and now is president and publisher of another Newhouse property, Random House Books.

From 1979 to 1983, Brown edited a British society magazine called “The Tatler.” When Newhouse, owner of the Conde Nast publishing empire, bought that publication, he also decided to revive America’s Vanity Fair. He brought Brown on as an adviser.

About a year later, at age 30, she took over as editor, and transformed the monthly into the most talked-about publishing success of the 1980s.

While Vanity Fair flourished in the fast lane, the New Yorker maintained its haughty disdain for all that was au courant. Then, in 1985, Newhouse bought it, too, and replaced the late, legendary editor William Shawn with Robert Gottlieb.

When Gottlieb apparently didn’t shake things up vigorously enough, Newhouse knew where to turn.

Brown says she tied her agreement to run the New Yorker to a promise by Newhouse that she have three months to tinker before actually taking over in September.

So last summer, she and key staffers sequestered themselves in Brown’s Long Island home.

“We had people coming out, and faxes flying, and Federal Express packages arriving with different choices of page and type. . . . I agonized about every single pica on the type face. I had dummies redone and redone and redone. It took me three solid weeks of discussion and testing to get the right paper.

“That kind of minutiae, I think, is what makes a magazine have a stylish finish. I was also extremely aware that one thing that would make readers absolutely crazed--the old New Yorker readers--would be if we kept on changing it.”

Her first move, she says, was to “really indoctrinate myself in the whole New Yorker sensibility.”

Brown says that she was immediately impressed with covers produced by founding editor Harold Ross: “Those covers are full of mischief . . . full of people, full of attitude.”

And that, she decided--with a confidence that even her detractors admire--was exactly what needed to be stirred back into the New Yorker mix.

*

At least on the surface, the New Yorker’s personality seems little changed since Brown took over.

Although the magazine is now laid out in full color on big-screened Macintosh computers, the corridors still reflect New Yorker tradition: understated, respectfully quiet, and just-so.

The main doors still sport brass portraits of Tilley and office numbers are stenciled on the white walls in trademark “Rea Irvin” typeface, which was created by the art director of that name soon after the magazine’s 1925 launch.

About 16 former staffers--including Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew, pop critic Elizabeth Wurtzel and longtime writers Stan Sesser and Ray Bonner--left the New Yorker, either resigning or failing to get new contracts. But more have stayed, and they appear here and there as they put the final touches on another issue: Roger Angell, fiction editor and baseball reporter par excellence, Alice Quinn, poetry editor, deputy editor Charles (Chip) McGrath . . .

If there’s a place at the New Yorker that seems to reflect the old standards, it’s Eleanor Gould’s little office, in which the 78-year-old grammarian and copy editor sits surrounded by a half-dozen dictionaries, manuals of English usage and other reference guides--as she has since the Ross era.

Now deaf, Gould graciously answers questions jotted on note paper, responding in the slightly strained voice of one who cannot hear.

The most obvious change under Brown, she says, is that Shawn would never allow obscenity or even slang in the magazine. “Under Ross it was even more strict. You couldn’t mention sweat or deodorant.”

Now dirty words creep into virtually every issue.

If that alarms Gould, she doesn’t let on. She focuses instead on how Brown has “revivified” the staff: “What’s interesting is that some of the earlier writers who seemed burned out have come back to life.”

*

Across the street at the New York Public Library, a tiny slice of the magazine’s inestimable legacy can be glimpsed in an exhibit of cartoonist Charles Addams’ work.

Elsewhere, stacks of old New Yorkers tell a story the way strata of rock reveal the Grand Canyon’s tale to geologists.

There are, really, only three layers:

* The spunky era beginning when Harold Ross created the magazine;

* The epoch beginning in 1952, when William Shawn turned the New Yorker into a literary powerhouse--everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen contributed--and a benchmark of civility;

* The microscopically modernized period under Gottlieb, which began in 1987.

Down in the library’s periodicals room, the past year’s issues, sprawled colorfully across a walnut table, update the strata.

For six months, the magazine moves along week by week at its own purposeful (some would say pokey) pace. The covers are bright and witty, reportage and reviews intelligent, advertising restrained.

Then comes Oct. 5. and the cover demarking the Brown-New Yorker intersection.

The scene is an autumnal Central Park, with a horse-drawn carriage in foreground. The passenger is a young, attitudinal, pink-haired punk.

Inside, informational snippets suddenly fill the stark table of contents, color drawings have sprouted like wildflowers in the gray “Goings On About Town” and elsewhere, and the “Comment” part of the sacred “Talk of the Town” has split into its own empire.

And there are more--many more--advertisements, including a spread for Calvin Klein in which shirtless rapper Marky Mark lounges in un-New Yorkerly fashion with a bare-breasted young woman.

Devotees have subjected these and other changes to more public scrutiny than Hillary’s use of headbands.

Which does not mean casual readers are likely to be stunned by what’s going on.

Marcus Allison, a young librarian in the periodicals room, says The New Yorker has never done much for him, and doesn’t now.

But then, as he splits the foot-high stack on the counter like a deck of cards, he spies two Brown-era covers.

Smack! He slaps the Oct. 12 issue featuring a extraordinary collage-like portrait of Malcolm X.

Smack! He slaps Art Spiegelman’s infamous Valentine’s cover, in which a Hassidic Jewish man and an African-American woman kiss.

Now these covers, he says, got his attention.

He even wrote a commentary for the African-American newspaper, The City Sun, about the Spiegelman painting, countering the views of a writer who called it “obscene,” and “an insult to black women.”

Passionate debate, in New York and nationwide, greeted Spiegelman’s cover.

“I think that’s what you want from the covers,” Brown says. “I think they should be a venue for controversial statement. . . . Not to exploit that billboard is insane, artistically.”

That attitude now pervades the publication. The old New Yorker would never stoop to lowbrow scuffling. The new one’s a scrapper.

*

Steven Florio, president and CEO of the New Yorker, is beaming: “It’s phenomenal,” he says, tugging at green suspenders adorned with steeplechase scenes.

Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show a spurt about the time Brown’s impending takeover was announced--and marketed. Newsstand sales boomed with her first issue, then dipped and rose, but always staying about 25,000 copies ahead of the previous year.

Average paid circulation for the first quarter of 1993, Florio says, will probably hit 750,000--more than 100,000 above last year--and he projects 830,000 to 850,000 by 1994.

And readers are finally getting younger, a demographic fact that attracts advertisers the way Zeke’s stinky bait attracts catfish. Ad pages, Florio says, are up about a quarter over last year.

“She’s far and away the best editor I’ve ever worked with,” he says of Brown. “A big part of my job is to encourage her and then stand back and watch her test the envelope.”

Brown’s critics see vulgarity rather than vitality emerging from that envelope. They say she has lowered an American institution to British tabloid standards.

Among examples cited, a “Talk” piece that seemed oddly sympathetic to ousted East German leader Erich Honecker--oddly, that is, until a reporter revealed it had been written by the wife of a Honecker defense attorney.

Then there was the revelation that critic John Lehr, who wrote glowingly about the Los Angeles Music Center’s production of “Angels in America,” had stayed at Center director Gordon Davidson’s home while working on the review.

The biggest brouhaha, however, developed over a “Talk” piece that shredded a recent book about Rupert Murdoch by author William Shawcross.

British author John le Carre wrote Brown in response, accusing her of assailing Shawcross in her magazine, because Shawcross had previously written nastily about Brown’s husband, who had been dumped by Murdoch.

“It’s just not so,” Brown says of that charge in particular or the assertion that she uses her magazines to reward friends (including advertisers) and punish enemies.

“I continually am doing things that annoy people who are my friends. I have to say: ‘Listen, I’m publishing a magazine. We dump on Random House Books all the time, and my husband is the president.’ ”

She also brushes off le Carre’s closing dig, which has been echoed by other Brown detractors: “God protect the New Yorker from the British.”

*

Brown acknowledges she wants her New Yorker to extend its grasp, both abroad and to what used to be called, with a dismissive wave, “the coast.”

Her expatriate status may even account, she says, for her lack of snobbishness toward Los Angeles, where she has set up the New Yorker’s first West Coast bureau (which is run by Caroline Graham, a Briton).

“I suppose I don’t have some of the received wisdom, the class feelings, geographical prejudices of Americans. . . . I was always sort of mystified by the New York snobbery toward L. A. . . . (It’s) very often on the cutting edge of new ideas.”

Her goal, she says, is to make “readers on the West Coast feel that we are tremendously interested in its problems and its cares.”

For example, she has photographer Richard Avedon shooting a portfolio on Los Angeles, and author Joan Didion working on “a huge piece about the situation and the mood of Los Angeles at the moment . . . and following through on the mayoral election.”

Still, there are those who see Brown’s interest in Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, as evidence of trendiness and trivialization at the magazine.

She dismisses such as “New Yorker fakery:”

“There have always been a lot of people who pretended to read the New Yorker, and didn’t really read it . . . who fake the stance, ‘Oh, I have just so missed the 35,000-word pieces about Zinc.

“The whole vulgarity thing, I think, is (from) people who don’t know what they’re talking about. . . . No good art has ever been genteel, well-mannered . . it isn’t what good art and good journalism is about. It’s about being real and taking risks and responding to the world in a fresh and direct way. Its not about being prissy.”

Her new New Yorker, she says, still features the longer, more thoughtful pieces and fine fiction, along with shorter, more current stories--as two 1993 National Magazine awards and another nomination attest.

And for that matter, Vanity Fair also published important, powerful, serious journalism that got overlooked amid the hoopla, she says: “It sounds so corny to bleat about this. . . . But people do write about women in a different way.”

Even when Vanity Fair was nominated for awards in serious reporting and general excellence, she says, the presenters always used adjectives like sassy , and sprightly , “words that I don’t think, frankly, would be applied if Clay Felker or Jann Wenner had been the editors. . . .

“It always amused me, because I felt we were beating the men at the men’s game, we scooped them time and again . . . we scooped the weeklies, we scooped TV. We had a lot of big scoops at Vanity Fair, and that wasn’t about being sassy or fluffy. It was about just getting the story and getting it better than anybody else did.

“It annoyed the hell out of a lot of people.”

She says, in fact, that one joy of running a weekly is she no longer has to sit on stories as long.

The opportunities for risk-taking have increased.

“Any new administration is going to make mistakes,” she says. “The alternative is to not be alive. The alternative is to just be safe, to treat the magazine like a stuffed owl of which I’m the curator.

“I don’t intend to be a curator. I intend to be an editor.”