‘I think people remember Demi Moore for that Vanity Fair cover more than any movie she did. It was taken just for Demi. Now it’s become iconic’

• That’s about the time people finish their internships. And then, not just Tatler, Vanity Fair, New Yorker , your own Talk. Now, you’re the biographer of Princess Diana.

Absolutely, I feel I’ve done magazines, I have done a weekly, I have done a monthly, I have done a book. Haven’t done a newspaper, so you know that’s the only thing I regret.

• But you have done a TV show.

I had a TV show, yes that’s true.

• But times have changed since you took over Tatler and you changed Vanity Fair, and then you outraged people by changing the New Yorker, but successfully. There was no Youtube or Facebook back then.

No, I think editing has never been more complex than it is now. I think it is a very hard thing for editors today to keep their focus because they are being assailed from every direction by this ambient news everywhere they go and to keep that focus and to keep yourself aware of what the priorities are, I think that is very challenging.

• Take us back to your times at the Tatler, at the ripe age of 25.

Well, I had this wonderful break, Tatler was this tiny little magazine and I was given a chance to edit it. My motto is, ‘If you don’t have a budget, get yourself a point of view.’ I mean, there was only a staff of 12 and I picked people who simply had a lot of attitude. And where there’s no budget, we were enterprising, which I think is a great challenge and a good thing for young journalists, you know, rather than join a big robust organisation where they are just being interns. It’s much better to take up something small where you haven’t really got any budget and you have to be inventive.

• Or constantly complain about the fact that the other guys have so much money while I take the tube.

Exactly, that was the whole game. We also had one big lucky break at Tatler, which was the Princess of Wales story. Princess Diana, Lady Di, became the great social story, we were the social magazine and Diana was to the Tatler what O.J. Simpson in America was to cable news. I mean, in the sense, it was the big story and we were right at the heart of it because it was a social magazine. So circulation really soared as we covered Lady Di right out through the wedding and beyond. It was great fun.

• And she never let you down.

She never let us down. Even to this day, she never let us down. So it was a wonderful, fun period. Then Conde Nast bought Tatler because it was this tiny little embryo. They had just begun Vanity Fair in New York. It had had three editors and it had failed and so the chairman said, ‘Let’s try to bring over this English girl who has put up circulation at Tatler.’ Because, by that time, Tatler had really soared and become a big sort of chunky glossy.

• But you broke a few rules even in the British media, where royalty was never really given any immunity.

Yes, Tatler was very irreverent. I mean the whole idea of Tatler was that we would cover society but we would do it with attitude, we would do it with fun, and we would bring as well a lot of really good writers. I mean, I had terrific writers such as Martin Amis, who is now a famous novelist, and Julian Barnes, who is also a famous novelist, and all these people were writing for Tatler when they were kind of kids but they were good. They weren’t reverent and they were extremely impertinent.

• Tell us about some of the most outrageous things you did at Tatler, the rules you broke?

When the Princess of Wales got engaged, we did this whole 12-page picture spread using a Diana lookalike, putting her in outrageous situations. We had somebody dressed as the queen with her cloggy dogs, the dogs terrorising Diana. I mean, it was a fun sort of young Turkish thing to do. We did a piece about Scotland making merciless fun of all the kilted earls and dukes and duchesses there. We had fun with everybody. We made a lot of fun.

• And what was the most outrageous comment you heard? You had your critics.

I certainly did have a lot of critics. Somebody once wrote a piece about me, saying that I was the worst social betrayer since the massacre of Glencoe in Scotland. Anyway, today journalism is a lot more irreverent. It’s just that we were the first to do it. And then, of course, at Vanity Fair, we did a lot of visually exciting things. We put Demi Moore on the cover, stark naked.

• That was iconic. In fact, that is an iconic thing in pop culture even now.

Yes, the sight of that pregnant stomach on the cover of Vanity Fair was an image that went all over the world. The interesting thing is that now it has almost become like a rite of passage for a young movie star who is pregnant to pose with her stomach showing but at the time we did it on Vanity Fair it was an absolutely sensational thing, and I never really expected that. It’s funny, sometimes when you do something, you think, ‘Oh, that will cause interest.’ But you have no idea of quite what an explosion it will cause. I mean that image of a pregnant Demi Moore must have been repeated a million times all over the world-Japan, South America, it was everywhere.

• She was seven months pregnant then.

Yes, she was seven months pregnant and it was a wonderful celebrity cover, I think. Annie Leibovitz, who is one of the great photographers of our time, took the picture.

• Tell us about how it happened and how did you persuade her. Because most movie stars would be loathe to do something like this.

Annie and I, both of us, really, wanted to do a cover that made a statement that the 1990s are going to be different from the 1980s. The age of glitz is over, and we want to have a more stark, sort of, personal and simplistic look. We were looking for that kind of story, and I said to her, ‘Let’s try to show the fact that she’s pregnant, instead of just doing her face, which a lot of magazines obviously would have done. Let’s show her shape.’ I was pregnant at that time too and I said, ‘Let’s celebrate womanhood. Let’s make a feminist cover about womanhood.’ Of course, Annie being Annie, she takes it one step further. At the end of the shoot, she says to Demi, ‘Shall I just take a picture of you without anything for you and Bruce (Willis)?’ Demi loved that idea and she posed for that picture.

• So there was no preparation.

No, there wasn’t. But, of course, it was taken just for Demi. So Annie came in with the picture and she said, ‘Look what I did in the end. Isn’t this just great?’ And I said to her, ‘You’ve got to persuade her to let us use this. We have got to have it. We must use this picture, not the one with the dress.’ And to her credit, Annie got Demi to go along with it. And now, of course, it’s become iconic. I think people remember Demi for that picture more than any movie she ever did. So, credit to her that she did it.

• Did you imagine it will create the kind of buzz that it did.

No, I didn’t. I have to say, I mean, I thought it will create interest. But I didn’t think that it was going to be a sensation. It’s very interesting what becomes a media phenomenon, in a sense. We had a story in my first issue of Talk magazine, which I did after the New Yorker. Well, actually, even in the New Yorker we did that. At the New Yorker, I did a cover of a Hasidic man embracing an African-American woman, a cartoon, a visual, because we didn’t have photographs on that cover, we had illustrations and I hired the famous cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who is a very controversial cartoonist, but I wanted to wake up the New Yorker visually. I said to Spiegelman. ‘Let’s do covers that have commentary.’ And we were doing a lot of pieces at that time about race and he did this cover about the Hasidic man and the African-American woman dancing and embracing on Valentine’s day and it caused the most tremendous amount of commentary and controversy. It created immense debate, and racial discussion, really.

• Breaking rules has been a habit with you. I don’t know how much to trust Wikipedia, but sometimes the stuff is so interesting. You shouldn’t let facts confuse you. But were you expelled from boarding schools thrice?

Yes, I was. But I wasn’t thrown out for anything like smoking cigarettes, or doing drugs, or drinking. I was always thrown out for being disruptive and for being rebellious, for being insubordinate, which I think I have continued to be in journalism.

• Well, Wikipedia is right on one of its facts. But is it right on the other-that one of the reasons for one of your expulsions was that you described one of your teacher’s bosom as an unidentified flying object?

Yes, it’s true. The headmistress. I wrote in my diary that she had a bosom like an unidentified flying object. But, you know, today we would sue her for invasion of privacy. We would sue her for suppressing free speech.

• How did she find your diary?

She went and read it, she was a big snoop, and I think that she should have been fired. But anyway, my father was always completely supportive. My parents always used to go and have the same line. They would say, ‘How tragic that you failed with this immensely interesting girl.’

• And what happened the other two times?

Oh, the other time I led a demonstration because they said we could change our underwear only three times a week. So I led a demonstration on the lacrosse pitch at that time and I had 40 girls marching up and down and saying, ‘Knickers out, out, out. Knickers in, in, in.’

• And the third time?

The third time I wrote a play which was suppose to be staged in the headmistresses study at the end of the term as entertainment and my play was about how the school was going to be blown up and be replaced by a public restroom and that was considered very offensive. But anyway, you know this is petty stuff, very petty stuff, but at that time these boarding schools were real ladies academies and I was considered very unladylike.

• You were expelled for asking to be allowed to change your knickers more often but you’ve got your revenge by selling a lot of knickers in your magazine.

Yes, I got my revenge by having no knickers on Demi Moore. But anyway at the New Yorker, we were able to do a lot of pieces that people discussed and I bought on a lot of investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh, who did a great expose just recently. So, he continued to do very good work.

• Tina, that is the most fascinating thing about you. Because we profile editors and journalists and say so-and-so is the serious type, so-and-so is the non-serious type. You have spanned the entire spectrum, from the Tatler to the New Yorker.

Well, I have always like the high-low mix. Yes, that’s true. I do enjoy mixing serious journalism with entertainment.

• Tatler with its killer snippets and New Yorker with its 15,000 word articles, which you refer to as tent articles.

Yes, that’s right. I’ve always felt that one must never forget that magazines are leisure things. If you are going to be serious and edifying, you must find a way to do it in a dramatic, even theatrical, way to make people read it.

• A lot of writing that you brought into New Yorker was trendsetting. You know the kind of stuff that David Remnick wrote on Russia and the Middle East, the stuff that Seymour Hersh has written. The first Abu Ghraib story came in the New Yorker.

You know, I actually just love writers. As a writer myself, I have always wanted to collect the very best talent. When I went to the New Yorker, it was the biggest challenge, it was like a sleeping beauty. It had had a great literary reputation, but it had also become so forgotten and so sleepy.

• But that happens to all publications. I have been trying to wake up mine for 10 years now. Maybe we need you.

But then you have got to try and wake it up every day. The editor’s got to find a way to do that. The best thing to do is to find the very best talent that you can. I mean, it sounds like a cliché, but my goal was to go and scour both England and America for the very best journalists and then listen to what they want to write, but sometimes also guide them to what they don’t want to write. I find that often journalists are great writers but they don’t necessarily have great ideas. The important thing is to notice that gleam in their eyes.

• And they want to get away by being wordsmiths.

They want to be wordsmiths. Exactly. And that’s why it’s hard to do literary journalism like the New Yorker. How do you get literary writers to write about controversial subjects? But we did manage to do it. It’s terrific. People like Lawrence Wright, who I bought in — he’s amazing! He has just written The Looming Tower, a wonderful book about the whole history of, the reconstruction of, jihad , which won the Pulitzer prize last year.

• In fact I remember that Mary Anne Weaver wrote a great piece on what we now call the University of Jihad, west of Pakistan.

Yes, absolutely there’s no doubt. And you know Jeffrey Toobin, who I hired, was an immensely talented legal writer and he bought a whole other dimension to the trial of O.J. Simpson, raising so many legal, cultural and ethical issues about that entire phenomenon, but it was a subject that everybody was interested in. So the trick is to get those upscale brilliant writers to address the subjects of our day, something that Norman Mailer, who died just last week, use to do. I always admired the way he engaged his time and I like writers who do that.

• Because if you do a 15,000-word tent-story, you can’t get away with rewriting someone or padding what he’s written. You need an incredibly gifted writer.

You really do. And they have to justify the length. One of my mottos was, ‘Have you justified the length?’ It’s not just about a long piece. Anyone can do that. It’s about focus.

• And to justify their talent and their work, you need to write a big cheque, isn’t it?

Yes. Certainly, big investigative journalism, narrative journalism, isn’t cheap. But you know at Tatler we didn’t have any budget and there we had to have a strong point of view and inventiveness to stretch our budget. But you know there’s no getting away from the fact that magazines like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair are expensive because you want to give people time.

• Were the Americans more tolerant of you than the British?

Well, I got a lot of flak in both places, really. I have always had a lot of controversy because I have shaken places up, and when you shake places up, you always get a lot of people who resent it. But I think at this point people understand what we did at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. I think particularly at the New Yorker, where I was very controversial, because this was a big sedate legend and I did everything from hiring photographers to putting photos in and bringing writers.

• Not changing was their USP, wasn’t it?

Yes, but now I think with the passing of time, people see that it had to be done and they can see that the writers I bought in, like (David) Remnick, Malcolm Gladwell (who wrote The Tipping Point), and Lawrence Wright were really the best. People understand that this was a revolution that had to happen and I was the agent of change.

• And then you had your failed experiment, Talk.

Yes, then I went off to do my own magazine and it sadly didn’t survive 9/11, when the advertising collapsed and I had a lot of flak putting it together, because at that point, there were a lot of critics out there waiting to gun me down and it’s very hard to do something new. I’m actually proud of some of the stories we did in Talk. We had a profile of Osama bin Laden in 2000. In the first issue we had an interview with Hillary Clinton, the first and only interview in which she talked about her husband’s infidelity. She had never talked about it before and it became like a Demi Moore kind of explosion. I mean she said about her husband that it was ‘a sin of weakness’ and that expression went all over the world because she had never spoken about it. We were able to break a lot of news in Talk.

• I read another comment of yours. You had a great party to launch Talk and I think you quoted somebody, ‘You should never have a party that’s bigger than the movie.’

Yes, the launch party for Talk. I think it was probably the best party that’s ever been given, on Liberty Island, with magic lanterns. It was the party where Salman Rushdie met his former wife Padma Laxmi for the first time. So he remembers it till this day, but it was such an occasion that it’s unwise, really unwise. I mean we had Madonna and Kate Moss and all these movie stars arriving on the boat but it was not a great idea. I think magazines are like mushrooms; they should grow in the dark without being vegetative.

• I can’t let you go away without telling us a bit about Salman Rushdie.

Oh, he’s a very old friend. The night at the Talk party was the very first time he met his wife Padma Laxmi. Now he’s split with her. Maybe I’ll given another big party and introduce Salman to someone else. Both he and I are involved with PEN and he was recently the president at the PEN festival. We are very old fudges and he is very much a figure in New York. I think he loves living in New York because it’s a great city for anonymity, in a way. Although you are very well-known, you can still hide, and that’s what he likes to do.

• What do you see him doing now?

I think he will continue to write his terrific writing. I actually think he is an important public intellectual as well. I mean, I would actually like him to be seen, perhaps because of the fatwa he doesn’t much like being endlessly on stage, but he is a very good speaker, and whenever he writes an editorial, it’s always very good and powerful. And I would like to see him do more TV.

• Tina, inevitably Diana. Tell us about her. I read about your meeting with her at the Four Seasons in New York, much before it became a controversy. She came and she bitched about her marriage, opened her heart out to Tina Brown, who has a wonderful memory.

Yes, it’s certainly true that I did write it all down. But Diana was a fascinating, complex, character. I mean, I actually see her as the great heroine of a novel, you know.

• But you don’t see her as the Princess of Hearts?

I see her sometimes as the Princess of Hearts. This is what’s interesting about her. If Diana had been all goody-goody, she wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting to me.

• But you also see her as mean, manipulative, media hungry.

I see her as media hungry. I see her as insecure and complicated, and at times paranoid. But her good side entirely wins out because she was so much better than them — them being the royal family. She fought, and I admire her courage. She had a lot of wit, she was not the sugar-candy princess that people liked to say she was. She was a very witty, tough, smart girl. I mean, for instance, just as an example, when she got divorced, she didn’t hire a divorce-matrimonial lawyer. She hired a media lawyer, someone who had never done matrimony before. She called him and said, ‘I want you to do my divorce.’ And he said, ‘I am not a matrimonial lawyer.’ She said, ‘This is my first divorce. But you understand the media, and that’s what I want.’ That’s pretty shrewd, and that was actually the real Diana speaking.

• And you said that when she met you at that lunch at Four Seasons, she was already planning to move to America and find a billionaire husband.

Well, certainly her eyes were turned towards America, because she felt like she had played out whatever she could in England. Basically the establishment had closed doors to her, and you know when those doors slam shut, because royalty almost always wins. I mean you can’t go up against the monarch and find that the country houses of England are still open to you. She was really driven to associate with celebrity culture all the time because she couldn’t really go back into the high society in England. And she really loved America and she felt that America was far more welcoming. And it is.

• And Americans, who have never had any royalty, would have loved her.

And America is a wonderful place to reinvent yourself.

• One more Disney character.

Yes. And we loved her. I mean, I can understand how she felt. England can become very claustrophobic, very tiresome. She was ready for the big time, you know, and that’s what she really wanted to do: live in America, have a place in England, and do her humanitarian concerns.

• So for international media, particularly magazines, who is the equivalent now of O.J. Simpson and Diana?

You know it’s interesting. There have only been two-three big iconic figures -Kennedy, Diana, and Marilyn Monroe. All three died young.

• Clinton’s almost got there in some ways.

Yes, but those other three died young and beautiful. And even now when we see those pictures of Diana released from the inquest and just going up the elevator with Dodi, it’s heartbreaking to think that this young beautiful girl is about to meet her death. There’s something incredibly haunting about that, so I think it’s the early death that really fixed her in the public mind.

• But can a new magic be created if Hillary becomes president?

The Clintons are definitely approaching that kind of status, I think, but I think the problem today, with so much media, is that everybody’s famous but nobody’s interesting. We all know too much about everybody. How do you distinguish yourself from the crowd apart from being assassinated? I mean those are the only things that can distinguish you from the crowd these days. It’s really difficult to maintain any kind of mystery and I don’t think you can be an icon without mystery.

• I think what it will take is for Tina Brown to come and start something else, not quite at 25 but…

Not quite at 25, but maybe in India. I am so in love with India.

• I think whether you come and start something in India or not, you will hear one of the lines you spoke today: ‘If you don’t have a budget, find yourself a point of view.’ Thank you.