KILLED - Episode 8: The Heyday

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

A Vanity Fair takedown of a prominent fashion figure…gets taken down. Featuring Dana Brown.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

There was a very well-known English restaurant and television critic and travel writer named AA Gill. It's a guy pleasure to be here with Adrian Gill, AA Gill and Anthony Boydain. Thank you very much. And Adrian was one of the first writers that I began to work with. And he was famous in the UK as sort of a hitman. He would just go to a restaurant, he would just trash it in such hilarious terms

and just literally put it out of business. And he really sort of attacked snobbism in many ways. The most depressing term in all of Gastronomy is fine dining. I think he became known as a snob, but I think it was less than he was a snob and more that he'd sort of attacked snobism in really funny ways.

And he became, you know, a really big critical star in the UK, and Great and Really wanted to get him to America to start doing this, his sort of style. In the late 90s, the store Jeffrey had just opened over on West 14th Street and you know it was a beautiful store but it was really pretentious. It was just that weird fashion that you think no one actually wears and it was men's clothes and women's clothes and it was kind of absurd and the sales people were were all kind of ridiculous and kind of really

judgmental of shoppers and sort of, you know, look at people and be like, no, don't get that. Hi, can you help me? No, no. I think actually Saturday night lives spoofed the store jeffery. Yeah, look, we don't carry diesel. We work at jeffries. We read Italian Vogue. It's our deal.

I don't come to where you work and knock the corn dog out of your hand. We brought Adrian over to basically just trash this place and insult the owner, which was a guy named Jeffrey Kalinsky. We're going to the Dolce Cabana show. How fast could you have your bags packed from the wrong? Jeffrey even posed for pictures. He was very, very excited, I think, to have a vanity fair story. And Adrian turned in this story. That was just really, really brutal and really, really funny. I had mixed feelings about it.

I mean, it was almost cruel. From Justin Harmon and audio chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Season 2 Episode 8 The Hay Day The heyday. What does an editor do? How do I explain this? To succeed as a magazine editor, you must be kind of clairvoyant. You need to have this uncanny ability to know not what's happening now, but what's next.

You need to be able to watch a movie months before anyone else, and pinpoint exactly the moment that everyone will be talking about. To know when a hot actor or a moment in fashion is over. You might call all this a soft skill, but the people who are good at it, they see things. Things other people don't see, and then they get some other people to write about them. My name is Dana Brown. I am a writer, screenwriter, producer, but for many, many years, I think 23, in total total I worked at Vanity Fair Magazine and I forcibly left in 2018 and I was the deputy editor at that point. Dana Brown's lengthy reign at Vanity Fair ended in 2018. A year many consider the

last gasp of magazine journalism. They didn't like have us escorted out of the building. Those times had changed, but Kanye Ness, they literally used to escort people out of the building. Dana is the first to admit. He stayed at the Media Party a bit too long. The first time I really noticed it was when I had a new assistant, this box was delivered to her from office services and I sitting there in my office watching them take out this giant blue ball that looked like an exercise ball and they put it in this little frame and they put it in front of her desk and took her chair away and she was sitting on a bouncy ball and I was like,

what the fuck is going on? What is that? and she was sitting on a bouncy ball and I was like, what the fuck is going on? What is that? 23 years is a long time at a legacy magazine. That's like four to five generations of people who think they run shit to get through. But his vanity fair, it was something to hold on to. I was there in the age of like,

of just these massively thick magazines with so much advertising. on to. His vanity fair was gilded. Free of social media, flush with cash, and run by white dudes with preppy names in this weird moment in time when it was kind of cool to be a cultured dick. A time when it was still okay to stick up your middle finger at the man, while sort of also being the man. Hello, you've reached the winter of our discontent. I started working there, I was 21 in 1994. We weren't paid a lot of money.

I think $16,500 was my starting salary. In 1994. The lifestyle that it gave you though made up for it. We had like basically free use of Lincoln town cars. Like whenever we wanted to go anywhere we wanted. We had like this magical petty cash system. Petty cash. Petty cash? It's office money. It's called Petty Cash.

Where you would literally just like fill out this form, go to this window on like the ninth floor, and they'd give you hundreds of dollars. And then you would just turn in receipts, even though like 80% of them were complete bullshit. And presiding over all of this was one man, great and Carter, a man who had risen the ranks as the pre-eminent shit talker of the rich and powerful with his satirical counter-culture magazine, Spy.

But when you stop and take a closer look, as we will tonight here at the offices of Spy Magazine, Fame turns out to be a very complex affair. Only to become the Holly Jolly King of a magazine for the rich and powerful. We are the culture of exclusive, aspiration and exclusivity. We try to create this world in these pages

with pictures and words that people really wanted to be part of. It was fancy dinner parties and beautiful houses and beautiful places. But it was people who were interested in a certain world, in a certain place, and they liked mid-century society stories, and they were into the canadies, and there was nostalgia and all that. We were trying to scale and appeal to a very large audience. So you wanted to make sure that every issue had a little bit of something. For those people that were really interested in European society scandals, like you want to have that story, you want to have the beautiful house story,

you have to have that, you know, you have to have a murder mystery story. You know, there's the Hollywood thing, it was really about that mix. The body of 34 year old Nicole Brown Simpson, ex-wife of O.J. Simpson was found after midnight. The whole O.J. Simpson thing happened literally like six weeks after I started.

And so the first year and a half of my job at Benley Fair, it was like all OJ all the time. Back off, get out of the way, sit back here. Like there were TVs on in every office with the trial. You know, Dominic Dunn, who was a writer for the magazine, basically moved to LA for a year and a half and covered the hell out of that. Maybe we will. In any case. You know it was also the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle and you know the internet was still kind of in its infancy not really around. It was sort of janky. But like television news 24-hour news channels were covering OJ 24-7. OJ Simpson story. OJ Simpson. OJ Simpson. It's case of a circus. And so how do you then, how do you

have someone cover something in a monthly magazine that every single network in the globe is covering in such incredible detail? It was like the last great moment of the monthly magazine colliding with a news story. It was sort of like the last great moment of the monthly magazine, colliding with a news story. It was sort of like the last gas of that. Everything at Grading Carter's Vanity Fair was predicated on taste, on pedigree, on word of mouth.

How would you know if a story made waves? You could just feel it. We had no research, we didn't do anything, there was no internet that would give you any information, and by the way, we didn't want any information. We didn't want it to be able to tell advertisers that stuff. There was just like a boozy lunch where you'd be like, hey look, our numbers are up 10% this year, and our circulations are now at 1.3, 350,000. And those are people you want to reach.

Because look at the magazine. Look at the magazine. They're all going to be reading this. And they all have disposable income. And they're all college educated. And they all have two cars. And it was kind of bullshit. It was like a bullshit industry.

It was all a well spun story told by gifted story tellers and reinforced by Amitose and kick ass Oscar party. It's the best party of the weekend. What are you crazy? If you're not here, you better be out of town. That was how we judged the stories. Our people talking about this. I mean, there was literally no science to it because there were no metrics.

Aside from the sort of like cafe society buzz that you would get, you know, you would go to a dinner and someone be like, oh my god, I read that story. That was so amazing. You know, or maybe it got option for film. And that became part of the buzz. Like, oh, that story was so good. Oh, it's going to be a movie. Like, oh, that story was so good. Oh, it's gonna be a movie. Oh, everyone in Hollywood is talking about it.

Or you would judge it on whether it got picked up by the press. You know, we had a hardcore PR department that was sending out stories to magazines, newspapers, globally to pick this story up, to pick that story. If there was a story about a scandal in France, they would send it to the press in France and get picked up. There would be a report at the end of every month with a giant packet of photocopy literally printed photocopy paper that some poor intern probably had to spend half a day on of just all the press clippings of the stories and where they went, you know, that was it. That was it. It was like human contact and press clippings.

And so a magazine editor's job was almost instinctual. It was like, no, this is a good story. This has everything. I mean, that's all we were concerned about. Is this a good story? Are there gonna be great pictures? Is this gonna look great in the magazine? Are our readers gonna love it? Like that was it.

This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. In the mid-90s, Dana Brown went from being a bartender at a media-loved hotspot to grading Carter's assistant at Vanity Fair. One of the biggest magazines in the world. If you want to hear more of that story, I do recommend Dana's memoir, Dilleton, which is as much fun to read as it is to say. And during the heyday of this so-called bullshit industry, Dana estimates that one in four assigned stories never ran.

And it was almost always fledgling writers who got killed. You know, we had contributing editors who were on contract and a lot of them were big name writers. And they would usually get the plum assignments. You know, they would get the big stories. And those would usually succeed because A, they were very good writers and very good reporters and those assignments were built for success. My inbox was flooded with pitches constantly from writers I had either been familiar with,

knew about, or some you didn't at all, but it was a great idea. And you would take a chance on it, and it was like development in a film studio. You know, of course it like a paramount like the Tom Cruise movie is going to happen because it's Tom Cruise and they're not going to let that fail, but then you have that kid that comes in with the pitch and you're like, well, let's give this a shot and let him develop this. And it was almost like that. But the high kill rate didn't stop people from trying to get published right alongside writers like Christopher Hitchens, James Wollcott, Dominic Dunn.

It had to be at such a high level to succeed out of those sort of like, nobody's or people who hadn't written for the magazine before. You know, I remember this one woman, I'd never heard of her. I think she was married to another writer and she pitched a story on this sort of oncoming world of micro jets and this concept of all this new travel with these small planes and it was going to be cheaper and it was going to be really easy to get from small cities to small cities. And it sounded like a great vanity fair story because it had a little bit of technology. It had these sort of young startups going after the big boys. It had really cool pictures of these really cool planes. And it came in and it was just it was just flat. There was

nothing there beyond like like that pitch that I just said it was like oh that sounds like a cool story but there was nothing more to it. There were no interesting characters in it. There was no conflict. It was just here's this thing. You just go you know what? I could spend the next six weeks on this going back and forth with the writer to try to get it to a place Where it's gonna be good enough to run in the magazine, but I just don't think it's gonna get there So that happened a lot And then that piece sort of had a scarlet letter on it in a way and they would try to take it somewhere else and sometimes

Sometimes that would work and sometimes be like, look, it's a great story. Other times, editors at other magazines would say, well, why did Vanity Fair kill this? What's wrong with this? And it sort of becomes tainted goods in a way. If all this sounds mythological, that's because it was. When people think about Vanity Fair, they think about Grayden Carter. When they think about Grayden Carter, they think about Vanity Fair. I think it's really it was. When people think about vanity fair, they think about gradient Carter. When they think about gradient Carter,

they think about banning. I think it's really one man, gradient Carter. You know, he brought glamour back to Hollywood in a way that we had forgotten about. Make sure you get the the Emmy in here, Adam. I'm not sure if there's room. Wait till you win one. You'll find room.

Everyone in the biz has a great and Carter story. Like the time he told a major advertiser to literally shove it up their f***ing. According to War reporter, Scott Anderson. He was doing a story on blood diamonds in South Africa and to beers almost every month ran an eight-page spread of ads in Vanny Fair, to be his diamond company. And when they heard

about this Don Diamond story, they said, we're going to take all the advertising away and we're going to keep it out for a year. And great cars and fuck you. I don't care. We're running it. For the time he killed a story on Gwyneth Paltrow. Here's journalist Ali Jones. There was a lot of intrigue surrounding a story about Gwyneth Paltrow that was supposed to come out in Vanity Fair before she and Chris Martin split up. And before the story even came out, which it ultimately did not end up coming out, a lot of information about the story got leaked to page 6 and the tabloids about how Gwyneth was telling people not to talk to Vanity Fair and ultimately, Graydon Carter ended up writing an editor's letter about why they weren't

publishing this story and what he said was basically that people were hoping for a big expose on Gwyneth Paltrow. Maybe she was having an affair or maybe she was doing a shady business deal, you know. There had been so much hype surrounding this possible story about her that he felt that the story they had could impossibly live up to it. There were also rumors that, you know, Guanajuato pressure George Clooney not to do the cover of Vanity Fair until they promised to not run this story, so I don't think we'll ever totally know what exactly happened in the backroom dealings there. I would say my cannon fodder for bigger game than the whole.

Bottom line, you never know what grade and carder might do. You don't stay on top for nearly a quarter of a century by being predictable now, do you? Magazines are not democracies. There is one person that runs everything, and if you catch him on a bad day and he decides he doesn't like a story, he probably won't come around on it. The writer would turn in their story. You know, you would sit, you would work at the writer, and then you would turn it into Graydon and just like sit there and hope for the best. And

sometimes it would come back and it would just have his initials on it, meaning it's approved, he read it, but it meant nothing. Sometimes the story would come back and it would say brilliant amazing great work and that was what you were hoping for and then a lot of times you would get a story that would say let's discuss and that was Graydon's coded language for like something's wrong. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Early on in his tenure at Vanity Fair, Dana Brown got kind of used to being a punching bag for subjects insulted by the magazine's pages. I remember I went to Mr. Chow's in Beverly Hills to meet like a friend of a friend and it was a table of like eight people.

And there was a guy who had run a studio who was dating this other person that I kind of knew. And he found out I worked at Vanity Fair and started screaming at me in the middle of dinner because there was a piece in Vanity Fair and that Hollywood issue. It was probably 1995 or 96. That really like went after him and really trashed him and blamed him for a lot of bad movies. And there was a blind source in the story who had said some very negative things about him. And he was accosting me. He was like, who was it? Who said those things about me? Was it someone from CIA? Who was it? I need to know. And I was accosting me. He was like, who was it? Who said those things about me? Was it someone from CIA? Who was it? I need to know. And I was like a lowly assistant. I had no idea who this guy was. I didn't know that he'd run a studio at one point. I didn't even read that story.

That would definitely happen where a subject thought a writer crossed the line and you would get the brunt of it. But back in 2001, our man, Dina, had found himself in an awkward situation. He's at a gorgeous meatpacking boutique with a wicked-quilled British journalist. And I'm Adrian Gail still. And an unsuspecting store owner named Jeffrey Kalinsky. Jeffrey, you had no idea who A.A. Gail was.

He just thought it was some, he thought it was like a puff piece on this beautiful storm. And the piece was, you know, it was probably about 2500 words and it was almost cruel. I mean, it was almost cruel. Like, it would have brought him to tears and I knew that I would somehow get the blame for this from the owner of Jeffrey. Dana wasn't sure what to do. This was the first big feature he'd ever edited. But he also trusted his boss implicitly.

Grayden had wanted AA Gill to do his thing at Jeffrey. And he had certainly done his thing. This isn't dinner? You do this because it makes you feel, I don't know, potent human. certainly done his thing. Dana just decided to give the story to Gradyn, unedited, and just see where the dial pointed. A few days later, he got the manuscript back. Gradyn had written only one word. Brilliant.

Oh well, come what may, Dana thought. Meet me, Mr. Chao, I guess. This was in I think August of 2001 and it was going to run in the November issue so we would close it over the course of September and it would run in in October because of course the issue comes out a month earlier than its date. And then 9-11 happened. And the morning of 9-11 or a few days later, you know, this piece is sitting there, it's about to go through their production cycle and Graydon called me down. All of a sudden, it didn't feel quite as cool to be a dick. He said, I just can't. I can't run this story. I can't go after and hurt a small business in New York City post 9-11. And I think Adrian's going to just have to understand that. I called Adrian and he said, I totally get it. I totally get it.

And I called Adrian and he said, I totally get it. I totally get it. You know, that was killed for a really good reason. And I'm actually glad that one was. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I was sort of relieved that I wouldn't have to deal with this sort of angry phone call from Jeffrey Kalinsky screaming at me. you know screaming at me.

Adrian A.A. Gill died from cancer in 2016. Jeffrey Kalinsky is currently Chief Merchant and Creative Officer at Theory. He declined a comment for this episode. All three locations of Jeffrey closed in 2020 due to the pandemic. When reached via email, Grayden Carter told Killed, quote, I don't recall this at all, but it does have the ring of possibility to it. Don't forget, Vanity Fair writers got paid in full whether their stories ran or not, and we paid well. That said, nobody likes to see their work shelved. But back in the golden era of magazines, back when the internet was just some nerdy thing

no one used and social media didn't exist, back when a retailer's career could be made or broken by a scathing profile in Van fair. Anything seemed possible, at least from where Dana Brown was sitting. Up until they rolled out the stupid exercise balls. The big shift with the internet was when everyone started having websites and apps and all that. It was limitless the amount of content you could put on there. You know, you were only limited by the size of your staff and how much you could actually get done, but you weren't really limited, whereas a magazine was very specific.

It was X amount of pages. I had the opportunity to get involved more heavily on the digital side of Vanity Fair, and the late aughts when we were finally sort of coming around and adapting. And I kept saying, no, I was like, I don't want to do it. Like I'm like a print guy. I like the pace. I don't want to be like woken up in the middle of the night because there's breaking news and have to like whatever. And it was really short-sighted of me, frankly, because that's just the way the world is right now. This idea that a breaking news story will hold for a month, and you will then read it in a magazine and there's anything fresh. It just doesn't exist anymore.

One day, Dana looked up and the sparkle was gone. I remember going over to Continast Entertainment when they first launched that and they had a building over on Broadway so they weren't the World Trade Center and their offices looked like, you know, our offices looked like offices and they had like exposed beams and concrete floors. It looked like a tech startup and it was like, and they'd like ping-pong tables and just like all that shit that people were doing in that era and I remember they had a cereal bar. That was like their big thing. And you would just see loads and loads of kids just sitting there like eating Captain Crunch and frosted flakes.

And it was like, yeah, that's our cereal bar. It's really popular. The velvet ropes and the golden handcuffs. It was all just gone. Had it even existed in the first place? When everything really started collapsing, it like wasn't fun anymore. The gossip dried up, and you know, when there's like this existential threat hanging over you for years and years and years and you just know you're sort of barreling toward the finale. Like all that fun stuff just sort of disappears. In 2017, after 25 years at the helm, Grayden Carter stepped down from his role as editor

of Vanity Fair. He didn't stay away for too long. In 2019, Carter launched Air Mail, a digital weekly newsletter for the quote, world citizen. But Dana, he still sings a Requiem for the heyday. It was the last time where there were no cell phones, there was no internet. It was the last moment where life could surprise you. This is a totally different world. Next time on Killed.

I think that having a reporter there was not necessarily any weirder than having these two young men in these, you know, perfectly starched white button down with the white button down collar and the name tag. I mean, it really is, like, right out of book of Mormon. Hello. Hi. My name is Jesus Christ. Killed is an audio-chuck production, created and written by Justin Harmon and edited by

Alistair Sherman. You can find links to all the published stories featured on the first and second seasons of Killed at KilledStories.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? you