Fresh Talk

By Margaret Carlson and Stephen Koepp

In the very first feature spread of the very first issue of her new magazine, Talk, editor Tina Brown's formula of mixing high culture and low comes into view like a pop in the nose. It's a haute-fashion shoot at a real Las Vegas boxing match, with a model, dressed by Helmut Lang, cavorting with Tony Curtis and George Foreman. On the cover, Hillary Clinton looks heavenward as if invoking divine guidance for her husband's "sin of weakness," Gwyneth Paltrow crawls on a leopard-print rug, and George W. Bush looks as if he's about to cut loose with some earthy language (as he does inside). The juice is in the juxtaposition, says Brown, as she lovingly leafs through her 254-page creation in her office 56 floors above Carnegie Hall. "I wanted to race up and down that high-low keyboard," she says.

It's an impressive riff, but is it a tune for today? Brown is coming out with an old-fashioned general-interest magazine, like Look or LIFE, at a time when publishing is gaga for websites and niches. Yet if anyone could dust off the genre, it's probably Brown, one of America's most successful magazine editors--if you're measuring in buzz rather than bucks. She's the one who put the glitz into Vanity Fair and the news into the New Yorker. When an editor who's won an astonishing 14 National Magazine Awards decides to cook from scratch, expectations fly over the moon. Part of it was her own fault, teaming up as she did with financial backers Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Disney's Miramax studios and proclaiming that her brainchild would be a "cultural search engine" that would spin off News! Books! Movies! And did she forget theme-park rides?

If all this helium weren't enough, Brown had the good fortune to be evicted from her preferred launch-party site by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he learned that Hillary, his Senate rival, would be on Talk's cover (and not because party givers had planned to festoon the Brooklyn Navy Yard with thousands of condoms featuring the Talk logo). Undaunted, Brown went higher in the pantheon of landmarks and nailed down the Statue of Liberty. The buzz intensified when a prepublication parody on the Internet swept through the chattering classes, promising pieces about "celebrities who have died but still sleep with other celebrities," along with "Banter! Emotion! Solipsism! Pretension! Cold fusion and Krispy Kremes!"

In the midst of all these exclamation points, the correct attitude was to be sick of it already without having seen it. But Brown has created something that shouts READ ME, if only because it's much more raw and immediate than anything else on the stands with such an arty sheen and mainstream aspirations. She's foraged for voices outside the media hothouse and let them vent as if they were at a dinner party (or logged on to e-mail). Physically, the magazine owes its effect to European large-format glossies like Paris-Match and Stern. A run through its pages is like watching a moving picture of short and long takes, dense alongside superficial; a centerfold of short bites about the Best Talkers up against a long essay on the joys of country life by a Manhattan denizen. It's Sesame Street for adults, designed to be read at an espresso bar.

The grit--an emergency-room doctor holding off death; the routine murders of Mexican girls slaving away in Juarez factories; the hacking deaths of tourists in Uganda told by the tour guide who survived--mingles comfortably with the glamour--luxe photos of Angelina Jolie; a gallery of the "Boys of September," including Hugh Grant and running back Ricky Williams; and a look at conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. This cocktail means you can fixate on Paltrow in leather with a whip, all the while saying how much you loved the family memoir by British playwright Tom Stoppard.

Tina Brown is a brand-name editor with a trademark style of management described as Margaret Thatcher hidden inside Holly Golightly, "an iron foot in Manolo Blahnik pumps," says a writer. She goes around the office wailing, "Newsbreaks! I want newsbreaks!" hoping her stories will generate stories about her stories. Like Oliver, she always wants more. "She's got Snickers and Milky Ways and Paydays clutched in one hand and as many Hershey bars as she can hold in the other, and she's still looking longingly at what she doesn't have, and you say, 'Tina, you have to put some back,'" says a consultant. Brown admits to spiking six pieces assigned for the first issue, but a competitor with a few of them on his desk jokes that her kill pile laid end to end could fill a library.

All start-ups are frantic; Talk's was especially so. As D-day approached, one of Brown's favorite young editors, Sam Sifton, threw up as she yelled at him, "Get out here now! I need you." David Kuhn, Brown's deputy, admits, "It was very intense," adding diplomatically, "Every piece has its own saga."

Brown's budget this time is much smaller than what she had at Conde Nast, where no one thought it was indulgent to ship your luggage by FedEx so it would be waiting at the hotel when you got off the Concorde. Brown, who was used to luring top-of-the-line writers with her megawatt charm and six-figure fees, can no longer feed the appetite she created. With only a reported $50 million from the Weinsteins and Hearst Magazines to work with--Brown lost more than that at the New Yorker--she has had to negotiate some writer fees to the second decimal point. This pleases Hearst Magazines president Cathleen Black, who says Brown has been "very responsive" to living lean. Brown is trying to turn necessity into virtue by reaching outside the usual media beltway to alternative weeklies and lesser organs for her 40 staff members and many contributors. But while that gets you enthusiasm and freshness, you also get some shaggy ramblers straining to be Hemingway who need to be edited with a chainsaw.

Talk's first four issues will be groaning with 442 pages of advertising from blue-chip sponsors such as General Motors, Evian and Ralph Lauren. (During the same period last year, Vanity Fair carried 825 pages.) Talk publisher Ron Galotti, whom Brown lured from Vogue, ensured against a sophomore slump by telling advertisers it was four issues or none. Galotti even tried to corral a reluctant advertiser by sending over a trash can filled with such rival titles as Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, along with a note saying, "We've taken the liberty of selecting the garbage on your media schedule." So far, Talk has signed up more than 100,000 subscribers, and its publishers predict an eventual circulation of 750,000 to 1 million.

What could spoil the party? Critics are on high alert for signs that Brown's angels at Disney will try to turn her creation into a house organ. The spread on Paltrow could be seen as a Miramax star vehicle--if she hadn't posed so dramatically against the image the studio so carefully cultivated. For the moment, Harvey Weinstein gives Brown a wide berth, using a diplomatic "what if" construction to suggest ideas, joking that she'll take the garden shears to him if he pushes too much. For her part, she likes having the charming, rumpled rogue around, a "mixture of Daddy and lover," says writer Lynn Hirschberg. At the office Christmas lunch in SoHo, Brown gave him a copy of The Art of Conversation and didn't complain when he smoked throughout the meal.

Wherever Tina has gone, envy has followed. Competitors watched in frustration as she printed some of the same celebrity claptrap they did, but added enough of a Brit-lit sensibility that she ended up being hailed as a sparkling wit. Only Tina gets to be Tina, and it might just work one more time.

--With reporting by Ellin Martens/New York

With reporting by Ellin Martens/New York