The gossip is that the Washington Post is in bad trouble and losing money as only Tina Brown can. Not that Brown has anything to do with the Post. Tina loses zillions for Barry Diller, who finances the Daily Beast at about 10 million greenbacks a year, and is closing the 40 million per annum loser Newsweek, although it’s not his own money, but that of those who invest with him. If I’m confusing you, don’t blame me. I actually pay my writers, unlike that other Greek, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, who dropped the Greek part of her name just as the Greeks let go of the drachma and went for the euro.If it’s all Greek to you, don’t worry. It gets messier.
Tina Brown is a Brit who became famous early on by romancing Martin Amis and Auberon Waugh, not the best-looking of men but fodder for gossip-mongers because of the bitchiness of their pen. I am rather proud to say that I’ve never read a word written by Amis, and aim to keep it thus, but I knew Waugh, and read him in these here pages, although I wouldn’t say we were bosom buddies. But back to Brown and the Greek, who now sounds like an American.
I first met Arianna when she was president of the Cambridge Union. She agreed to write a foreword to my book on the Greek colonels, this little deal arranged by my wonderful publisher and friend Tom Stacey. Arianna was ecstatic about doing it. She considered me on a par with Aristophanes and Thucydides, not to mention Herodotus, or so she is thought to have said to Tom. Then the Greek colonels collapsed, Taki became a non-person in Greece for having served them, and Arianna decided to stick closer to someone like the great Bernard Levin than to the dirty little Nazi Taki. Arianna went from strength to strength, having left me behind. She wrote a book on Callas, said to have been edited rather too much by Bernard Levin, a man who had forgotten more about music than she was ever to learn. Under the advice of Lord Weidenfeld, another suitor, she moved to America and befriended people like Barbara Walters, probably the dumbest white woman ever to appear on television, and that’s really saying something. (I say white because there is a very dumb black woman on South African TV who is apparently dumber.) After a brilliant marriage to a very rich Texan oil man who preferred boys to girls, Arianna got divorced, kept custody of her two semi-Texan heiresses, and started the Huffington Post. After a while she sold it for 350 million smackers. I tried to commit suicide when I read that, but was prevented from doing so by my daughter, who runs my own website Takimag and who has promised to sell it one day for 351 million greenbacks.
How do you sell something for $350 million without paying the writers and without actually breaking any news is a Greek mystery to me, but good luck to Arianna. They say there’s a sucker born every minute, and she found one in AOL, who bought her out but also kept her running things. Tina is someone else who has lost countless millions but is known as a brilliant editor who saves magazines. She lost millions with the New Yorker, lost 50 million big ones for Harvey Weinstein with TALK magazine — now defunct — and is at present losing masses at Newsweek and the Daily Beast. Yet Tina is a success, while Taki is considered a bust. It simply ain’t fair.
The good news for Tina is that she is not running the Washington Post, because that old paper is in a mess since the publisher, Donald Graham, decided to give it as a plaything to his niece, Katharine Weymouth, daughter of the infamous Lally Weymouth, named Lally because no one could spell Ugh back when she was born. The niece got into trouble right away by trying to sell dinner parties to rich people in DC in exchange for the fatties meeting Washington Post writers. (Personally I’d pay not to meet those pompous asses, but then we don’t all think alike.)
After that little trick was exposed, la Weymouth kept firing good editors to make way for compliant ones, and we all know how these things end. Badly. The Post sold Newsweek to Barry Diller via Sidney Harman, a 92-year-old magazine mogul wannabe who died just in time for Tina to come in. From Weymouth, to Harman, to Diller to Brown, it sounds like a triple play in baseball and a sucker play in business. I have been writing for the greatest weekly in the world for close to 36 years now and we are finally making oodles of moolah. But we never lost anything like the amounts Tina drops. Takimag is ready to break even next year, and we have more than a couple of million reading us. And we pay our writers, something the Greco-Texan never learned to do.
I wish someone would tell me the trick. How to get others to pay millions while I get all the glory for losing them. Now that’s what I call a good editor. Step up and be counted, Tina Brown.
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