Dana Brown’s Entertaining and Insightful Memoir of Vanity Fair, ‘Dilettante.’

Upon return from a family vacation three summers ago, economist Ike Brannon remarked at a subsequent lunch about an individual at the resort who was almost literally covered in tattoos. This was an expensive resort, and Brannon wondered how he and his family were sharing the same pool. To be clear, Brannon’s wonderment about the inked up vacationer wasn’t of the nose-upturned variety; rather he wanted to know what profession afforded so much individuality and disposable income.

It turns out his poolmate was a chef. To younger readers, the mention of chef likely elicits a “so what?” response. For those born in the 1970s or earlier, the response is different. We remember. We remember when chef was a “dead end” job for, yes, people with tattoos. They were referred to as cooks then. It’s a long or short way of saying that the economic thinker in Brannon was celebrating the happy truth about prosperity: it elevates all manner of genius (this phenomenon has been referred to in a book by yours truly as “Tamny’s Law” – look it up) that a lack of abundance suffocates. This man covered in tattoos seemingly possessed Einstein-like qualities in the kitchen that afforded him fancy vacations. How fortunate about the time in which he was born. Had he come of age a generation earlier, he and Brannon almost certainly wouldn’t have been at the same pool.

The exciting truth about prosperity kept coming up in Dana Brown’s new book, Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph, and Disaster. It’s a very enjoyable memoir of the glory days (and very chillingly, the declining ones too) at Vanity Fair, and it’s perhaps unwittingly very informative for those seeking a much better understanding of economics. The view here is that there’s an exaggerated quality to the book’s “True Tales” subheader that will sometimes bother the literal in our midst, but this will just add to the fun for those simply looking for fun. Brown’s book very much delivers in the fun and interesting category, but there’s also a lot of very worthwhile learning for those who want to. It’s easy to recommend.

Why the chef introduction? To understand it, the why behind Brown’s memoir has to first be understood. Brown was assistant to legendary Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter for several years, only to rise up to deputy editor of one of the most consequential magazines in the history of the medium. Brown worked for VF from 1994 all the way to 2017, which means he has a story to tell. Said another way, if he’d come up under the editor of Good Housekeeping, readers can rest reasonably assured there would be no book. Carter and Vanity Fair are different. Those close to them rate books, and for several years Brown’s desk was right outside Carter’s smoke-filled office; an office in which Brown frequently pulled on Winston reds while Carter took long drags on Camel Lights. The cigarettes were generally free, or paid for by someone else. So much was free in the 1990s and 2000s for prominent magazines. The persistent irony of business life is that right when prominence and profits are greatest, the cost of most everything plummets. Vanity Fair and corporate owner Conde Nast were thriving for much, but not all of Brown’s time there. This truth ironically explains the excess, but also paradoxically set the stage for the inevitable decline. Margin creates opportunity. It seems the throat clearing from me won’t stop.

Indeed, the mention of the gradual elevation of chef to superstar status still lingers at the front of this review. Here’s the story. The college dropout in Brown, a lifelong New Yorker, reached the promised land of Manhattan in the early 1990s, though it was not the Manhattan most know now. Brown lived in the needle and addict infested Lower East Side, and he did because rent for individuals like him who “had no skills, no real passions or interests,” and who were “complete fuckup[s]” like him, was cheap. His neighbors were the Hells Angels, who had purchased the tenement next to him presumably for next to nothing in 1969. Fifty years later the former tenement sold for $10 million. Progress is beautiful.

The main thing is that Brown was living where no one wanted to because he was going nowhere, or so it seemed. More on that in a bit. There’s as previously mentioned an exaggerated quality to Brown’s past, but in the early 1990s he was toiling as a pastry chef’s facilitator (he describes it as “pastry child”) of sorts for Danny Meyer’s Union Square Café. Nowadays such a job would be viewed as a stepping-stone to better tattoos, vacations at fancy resorts, and extraordinary renown, but at the time it screamed downward mobility. Meyer’s own excellent memoir (review here) confirms this truth. He recalls telling friends in 1980s New York of his intent to shift from a high-paying sales job to cooking, only for those he informed to themselves shift very uncomfortably in his presence.

Brown had no skills as previously mentioned, but also seemingly little confidence going back to childhood. “And when you’re never good at anything as a child, you get frustrated, and eventually stop trying and sometimes end up rebelling.” It’s all a long way of saying that in Brown’s early New York days it was easy to envision the chef that Brannon spied in wonderment three years ago. As Brown himself notes, he worked in restaurants before it was “an actual career choice.” The only difference, and it’s the most underrated difference in all of economics, is that the children of the future will more and more not feel as Brown did when he was young, and certainly not when they’re adults. Though more than a few economists and commentators foolishly drool about the alleged downside of prosperity and its obvious (and wondrous) corollary (enormous wealth inequality), the simple truth is that wealth creation is what enables more and more of us to showcase our unique skills and intelligence in the real world. Had he been born a generation earlier, Brown (like Brannon’s chef) likely wouldn’t be promoting a book inspired by an impressive career.

How did Brown make the leap from Union Square to 350 Madison Avenue, where Conde Nast’s offices were in the 1990s? The pay at Meyer’s restaurant was too slim, at which point he’d heard about 44, the restaurant inside Ian Schrager’s Royalton Hotel. In the early 1990s, it was a frequent lunch spot for Anna Wintour, Carter, and other Conde Nast players, and then as all successful restaurants/bars do (serving different clientele at different times), it morphed into an even louder and more crowded evening spot for media, but also for movie stars, rock deities, and other recognizable people. Brown got a job as a barback there (10% of tip totals that were rather enormous) that included side work whereby members of the 44 team would staff “salons” at the apartments of editors like Carter.

Soon enough, Brown received a phone call from Carter’s assistant in which he was asked to come in for an interview. In Carter’s words, “The reason I wanted to talk to you is I noticed you at those dinners. The way you carried yourself, the way you interacted with people. You’re respectful and humble. You’re a hard worker.” Brown also senses that Carter perhaps saw some of the outsider in Brown that he saw in himself. While Brown arguably overstates his humble beginnings (more on that later), he lacked the traditional educational background of most within Conde Nast, and that perhaps appealed to the re-invented Carter? The main thing is that while Carter eventually came to embody Vanity Fair, he was in many ways an unlikely choice beyond not having been born rich and titled in the way that many profiled in VF had.

Though his tombstone will most be associated with Vanity Fair, Brown reminds readers of what preceded the magazine for Carter: he was the co-creator of the wildly funny Spy, which was “merciless in its skewering” of Vanity Fair and the people profiled within, plus he famously (at least by Upper East Side New York City standards) made the New York Observer a relevant read where it previously hadn’t been. Though Carter wound up chronicling the rise of the “New Establishment” (communications and information) at Vanity Fair, though he wound up producing the size equivalent of Vogue’s “September Issue” with the “Hollywood Issue,” Brown writes that before being tapped by Si Newhouse as Vanity Fair’s editor-in-chief, Carter “didn’t even like the magazine.” Carter very much wanted the more high-brow New Yorker, only for then Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown to learn of the opening and demand it for herself. It’s so hard to imagine now given how Carter once again came to embody Vanity Fair, but Brown’s recollection is that Carter didn’t find his confident footing right away such that there were questions about his own longevity. Here’s hoping Carter eventually pens his own memoirs to fill in all the blanks, and so much more.

About the magazine industry of the 1990s, Brown writes that “if you were a Conde Nast editor in chief, there was essentially no ceiling on your spending whatsoever.” Si Newhouse plainly wanted his editors to look and live like the high-end people they profiled, which meant they all had drivers, fancy apartments in the City financed by low interest loans from the Newhouses, and also second homes similarly financed. Expense accounts were princely. Brown cops to becoming a profligate spender in a company full of them, which brings us to one of the many economics lessons within his book. Brown writes of a work colleague who “had been cautious” about spending, and had “spent well under” the amount allotted to him for client entertainment at the beginning of the year. Brown, conversely, had “gone wildly overbudget the year before.” Brown’s expense allocation for the following year was subsequently upped, while that of his colleague had been reduced by a third to reflect spending that was a third under what been budgeted to him. This precisely explains Washington budgeting to this day. Those allocated dollars from Congress make sure to consume it, else future budgets reflect reduced need. In government it’s in a very real sense natural for waste, or excess to be rewarded. No one spends the money of others as carefully as they do their own.

All of which leads to an important truth about pay and perks: they’re a function of the worth individuals produce much as low pay and low perks are a consequence of lesser value produced. This isn’t a critique of certain professions versus others as much as it’s a statement of reality. In the 1970s when Sports Illustrated was one of the world’s most profitable magazines, Frank Deford routinely flew in first class while the NBA teams he covered sat in coach. The players were obsequious to Deford because his expense account was similarly limitless such that he funded lavish eating and drinking on the road. Magazines were money machines then, but the NBA wasn’t. Nowadays it’s increasingly rare that sportswriters travel as is, and they certainly don’t have the funds to buy dinner and drinks for NBA players too rich to care. Looked at through Vanity Fair today, it’s no insight to say that there are myriad ceilings on spending, and all other aspects of magazine production. What used to be a glamorous job no longer is. Market forces born of consumer preference, but also market forces (in the words of Brown) born of editors like Carter giving “the people what they didn’t know they wanted,” are and were the drivers of high pay and perks. When the profits decline, so does the pay. Brown plainly saw the highs and lows of an industry, which speaks to the value of this book as an informative one about economics. As a slimmed down Conde Nast reveals, “market power” is a myth. And it’s not just with magazines that the latter is true.

In Brown’s day, and by extension mine, network news hosts were a big deal. You knew them. Precisely because cable television is a somewhat of a modern thing (in southern California where I grew up, it didn’t arrive in the CNN/ESPN/HBO sense until the late ‘80s at the earliest), “being the anchor of one of the three evening network news broadcasts was the most visible – if not the most important – job in journalism.” Brokaw, Jennings and Rather were known (if not despised by some of us) quantities in the 1990s. Quick, name the three network news hosts in the 7 pm slot today. Tick tock, tick tock. Lester Holt comes up for your reviewer at NBC, but only because of the high-profile way in which his predecessor (Brian Williams) was pushed out.

Considering the Vanity Fair offices, Brown is clear that upon his arrival in 1994, “no one important” was using e-mail, that when the phone rang at the office or at Carter’s apartment, it was a landline that you were expected to pick up, and if you had too much to drink while in Los Angeles during Oscar month, you called a cab company on a payphone only to hopefully remember where you’d left your rental car the next day in order to retrieve it. There’s a human tendency to lionize the past, but if you’re reading this review (online….), that’s all the evidence you need that the primitive nature of the booming 1990s would quickly have you losing your mind if you had to return to it.

All of these mentions by Brown are useful inputs to his enjoyable stories, but they’re most crucial as a reminder that dynamic, capitalist economies by their very name relentlessly force the present into the past. Stasis is for failed countries and economies. Failure doesn’t cause economic harm as much as it’s the most crucial driver of economic progress. You quite simply cannot have progress and the wealth creation that is a consequence of it it absent the commercial stars of the present seeing their wings clipped. Brown knows this well, or at least part of it for him having lived it.

To see why, consider the previously mentioned New Establishment issue. To Carter’s credit, he could see that the producers of communication and information abundance would play a substantial role in what lay ahead. Of course, as Brown laments, “Little did we know at the time that we were also beginning to write our own obituary.” In the words of eventual New Establishment member Jeff Bezos, “your margin is my opportunity.” While the limited in thought yet again bemoan the myth of “pricing power” that springs from “market power,” in the real world of commerce the producers of goods and services are well aware that fat margins invite all sorts of investment to win same. Brown writes that “There were so many magazines in 1994, so many new magazines, and so many great magazines.” Put Vanity Fair somewhere at or near the top of great, at which point its success attracted imitators but also cheaper ways of winning our eyeballs. Enter the internet, and arguably most crippling of all, the supercomputers that we call phones, and that everyone everywhere is staring at all the time. These supercomputers brought to the market by members of the New Establishment eventually rendered the list and the magazine that brought it to life much less than it formerly was. As Brown puts it, “the four horsemen of the magazine apocalypse” were the “financial crisis, the iPhone, Facebook, [and] Twitter.”

Arguably the most difficult chapters to read are the closing ones. Anyone who is a writer or in any kind of media will know what I mean. Brown very articulately writes of a seeming cliff that old (and even new) media fell off of from 2011 and beyond as iPhone, Facebook and Twitter usage soared. How people interacted with the internet changed, and did so profoundly. As for what it meant for magazines like Vanity Fair, Brown writes of newsstand sales alone in the 1990s that were in the 350,000-400,000 range, only for the 21^st century to eventually bring on an all-new world. While Facebook was “able to target advertising at very specific demographics and then show advertisers actual figures of who saw the ad, who clicked on it, and who made the purchase,” those in magazines who were not “data people” could sell a magazine ad for $100,000, talk up the demographics of the readership, but not much more. Margins always, always, always create opportunity. It can’t be stressed enough how mythical are market and “pricing power.”

In a very real way it’s sad. It’s not just that Vanity Fair was once an essential and very excellent read. It’s that so many of these magazines were. Sports Illustrated was about so much more than sports. The view here is that it was and is (when it publishes) a weekly lesson about life. The problem is that it’s no longer anywhere close to weekly. Neither is the wondrous celebration of capitalism that is Forbes. The old media was so much fun. That it’s now “old” is yet again a sign of progress, and evidence that we’re improving all the time, but some of what dynamism leaves behind is very much missed. Or kind of missed. As always, we overrate the past, or mis-remember it. If the past was so great, then it wouldn’t have been replaced.

Brown indicates that while the Newhouses (owners of Conde Nast) built their fortune initially on newspapers (Samuel Newhouse Sr.’s first purchase was the Staten Island Advance in 1922), they’re sufficiently diversified into new media (Discovery Media, etc.) that they’re hardly in the poorhouse as newspapers and magazines slowly shrink. About the achievements of Newhouse Sr., Brown pleasingly writes that it was “the kind of American success story that has drawn so many to our fair and fertile shores over the years.” Amen.

In explaining what has proven a lure for strivers around the world in a “country built on striving,” Brown is either on purpose or unwittingly making a bigger point: what he’s saying is that as opposed to a discouragement to the poor, wealth creation is the ultimate lure. It’s alluded to earlier, but in modern times so many clueless economists and pundits go comically overboard in whining about the alleged cruelty of wealth inequality. Yet as Brown indicates, perhaps not realizing in total the meaning of what he’s indicating, the world’s poorest risk it all and have long risked it all (including their lives) to get to the country most defined by rampant inequality. The world’s poorest want to come here because they see the possibilities, but also because they know that opportunity is greatest where wealth is most unequal. Call the movement of human beings the purest market signal of them all. Put another way, when immigrants come here they’re not migrating to Buffalo, Flint, and Milwaukee. Why would they?

About what Brown writes about the U.S. as the land of opportunity for strivers, it would be fascinating to ask Carter his own thoughts on the matter. Carter was heavily influenced by playwright and screenwriter Moss Hart’s New York City memoir Act One, he recommended to Brown that he read it “assuring me I would learn everything I needed to know about life from that book,” and in it Hart is beautifully and happily forthright that “The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.” Yes!!! Why the interest in Carter’s thoughts? It’s rooted in Carter’s lament in an April of 2014 (or perhaps 2015) issue of Vanity Fair about the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of seemingly few. Carter was plainly unhappy with the development, but the possibilities that inequality signifies is yet again what “has drawn so many to our fair and fertile shores over the years.”

After which, there are quite simply no companies, no jobs, and there’s no progress without investment that is a consequence of unspent wealth. Which means the greater the concentration of wealth, the greater the amount of wealth in search of new minds and ideas to fund. In short, inequality is a feature of a free society that is the best scenario for funding the dreamers of today and tomorrow. Inequality has long been the lure for strivers, including arguably the Canadian immigrant in Carter. Which means we need more of it, not less. Would Carter ever budge or concede on the matter?

About Carter more broadly, Brown’s accounting of him is eye opening. The perception from well outside his world was that Carter had come to be a part of the rich, celebrity-filled crowd he had formerly skewered, but Brown reports that Carter’s least-favorite night of the year was the Vanity Fair Oscar Party; a party Carter routinely left early. Brown indicates that as opposed to a heavy socializer, Carter “rarely traveled without his wife and children.” Most of all, he sounds like a good person? Brown describes him as “humble and self-deprecating,” and notes that “in all my years of working for Graydon, he never once took credit for anything.”

Maybe if he’d been less political he would have at times been more appealing? My memory of the George W. Bush years in particular is of Carter’s “editor’s letter” at the front of the magazine more and more existing for Carter to offer his own views on politics. It was over the top. And before readers think the latter is an expression of my own political views, it should be said here that I view George W. Bush as – by far – the worst president in my lifetime. I’ve made this case for years and years. No defender of Bush, Carter’s harsh politics shrunk him.

Whatever one’s feelings about Carter, it’s sad to read of him retiring in 2017; albeit on his own terms. On a lot of levels. Carter had so become the face of such a blast of a magazine, and his retirement was an admission of the medium and magazine’s faded glory. It was also tough to read about because people like Brown had gotten married while Carter was running the show, they’d had kids. They knew they would soon be out of work. As Brown explained it about Carter being tapped for the top spot at Vanity Fair back in the 1990s, “When a new editor takes over a magazine, the first thing they need to do is clean house.” Carter’s replacement in Radhika Jones did just that. Brown was one of those to be cleaned out, and he writes movingly about it. As the book becomes less entertaining, it in an odd way becomes better.

The main thing is that Brown, while at times cripplingly depressed for having been let go, acknowledges that it was probably necessary. And in doing so, he provides another economic truth: contra the routine, every-generation wailing from well-to-do columnists about the downward mobility of the new generation, it never comes to pass. In a country like the U.S., the youth we deem lazy, spoiled, and all sorts of pejoratives inevitably thrive. Brown knows why. It’s explained by his understanding of why the Vanity Fair staff of print types had to be cleaned out in favor of new blood that understood the digital world ahead. The youth “had been raised with this stuff; the internet and social media and new technology were intertwined with their DNA.” EXACTLY. And this is why readers can rest assured that Facebook, Twitter, and other new media that knocked Vanity Fair off of its lofty perch will soon enough be dethroned by the “lazy and spoiled” youth of today. They grew up with the technology that elevated today’s powers, and knowing it intimately, they uniquely possess the ideas to push those at the top to the side.

Were there weaknesses? For sure. Too many lines like “I didn’t quite know where or how I fit into the world.” There was also a bit of doth protest too much in Brown’s efforts to write himself as a hopelessly dim, poorly read, grammatically challenged, outsider. On p. 72 Brown wrote about Conde Nast in the early days and of how “Literary references dropped into conversations would go right over my head,” only for him to write two pages later about how in high school “I became particularly attracted to twentieth-century American counterculture writers like Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim Robbins, John Irving”, etc. etc. It also later comes out that the outsider who allegedly “struggled with basic grammar” attended Putney, that his father had a second house somewhere in the Catskills, and that in the early days of restaurant work Brown did some modeling with society type Mark Ronson. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s not, but it seemed at times that in retelling his story, Brown was writing a memoir to fit a story that he wanted to be his. Though he acknowledges “white privilege” (which brings up its own set of questions), it just seems Brown went over the top in claiming humble beginnings.

Whatever the truth, it doesn’t change what an interesting and entertaining read Dilettante is, and also what valuable economic insights it provides. Notable here is that the late Adrian or A.A. Gill, one of the writers Brown edited at Vanity Fair, is quoted by Brown as writing that “I’ve made my living by watching television, eating in restaurants and travelling.” What a quote! What a comment about how grand life has become. Dana Brown embodies this truth, as do so many of us lucky to be alive at a time when interests and passions increasingly define our work. Read this book to see why.