Background and career
Christina Hambley Brown, Lady Evans (born 21 November 1953), is an English and American journalist, magazine editor, columnist, broadcaster, and author. She is the former editor in chief of Tatler (1979–1982), Vanity Fair (1984–1992), The New Yorker (1992–1998), and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast (2008–2013). From 1998–2002, Brown was chairman of Talk Media, which included Talk magazine and Talk Miramax Books. In 2010, she founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform to elevate the voices of women globally, with summits held through 2019. Brown is author of The Diana Chronicles (2007), The Vanity Fair Diaries (2017) and The Palace Papers (2022). As a magazine editor, she has received four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club awards, and ten National Magazine Awards, and in 2007 was inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame. In 2021, she was honored as a Library Lion by the New York Public Library. In 2022, Women in Journalism, the UK's leading networking and training organization for journalists, honored her with their Lifetime Achievement Award. Brown emigrated from her native England to the United States in 1984, and became a U.S. citizen in 2005. In 2000, she was appointed a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), for her services to journalism overseas, by Queen Elizabeth II.
Brown was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, and grew up in the village of Little Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. Her father, George Hambley Brown, worked in the British film industry producing the Miss Marple detective films starring Margaret Rutherford. Her mother, Bettina Kohr, who married George Brown in 1948, was an executive assistant to actor Laurence Olivier on his first two Shakespeare films. Brown's elder brother, Christopher Hambley Brown, became a film producer. Brown was considered "an extremely subversive influence" as a child, resulting in her expulsion from three boarding schools. Brown studied at the University of Oxford from the age of 17. She studied at St Anne's College, and graduated with a BA in English Literature. As an undergraduate, she wrote for Isis, the university's literary magazine, to which she contributed interviews with the journalist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore, and for the New Statesman. Her irreverent article about an invitation from Waugh to a Private Eye magazine lunch caught the eye of New Statesman editor Anthony Howard, who offered her an Oxford column. While still at Oxford, she won The Sunday Times National Student Drama Award for her one-act play Under the Bamboo Tree, which was performed at the Bush Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival. A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, was mounted at the London fringe Bush Theatre in 1977 and was later performed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
After graduating from Oxford, Brown was invited to write a weekly column for the literary humor magazine Punch. These articles and her freelance contributions to The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph earned her the Catherine Pakenham Award for the best journalist under 25. Some of the writings from this era formed part of her first collection Loose Talk, published by Michael Joseph.
In 1979, Brown was invited to edit Tatler by its new owner, the Australian real estate millionaire Gary Bogard. During her tenure, she turned the society magazine into a successful modern glossy magazine with covers by celebrated photographers Norman Parkinson, Helmut Newton, and David Bailey, and fashion by Michael Roberts. Tatler featured writers from Brown's circle, including Julian Barnes, Dennis Potter, Auberon Waugh, Brian Sewell, Martin Amis, Georgina Howell (whom Brown appointed deputy editor), and Nicholas Coleridge. She transformed the social coverage with pictures by her young discovery Dafydd Jones. Brown wrote content for every issue, contributing sharp surveys of the upper classes. She traveled through Scotland for a feature titled "North of the Border with the Thane of Cawdor" and wrote short satirical profiles of eligible London bachelors under the pen name Rosie Boot. Tatler covered the emergence of Lady Diana Spencer, soon to become Princess of Wales. Brown joined NBC's Tom Brokaw in running commentary for The Today Show on the royal wedding on 29 July 1981. Tatler's circulation increased from 10,000 to 40,000. In 1982, when Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., owner of Condé Nast Publications, bought Tatler, Brown resigned to resume full-time writing. She also hosted several 1982 episodes of the long-running BBC1 film review television series Film ... as a guest presenter.
In 1983, Newhouse brought Brown to New York to advise on Vanity Fair, a magazine he had resurrected earlier that year, with a circulation of 200,000. She served as a contributing editor for a brief time, and was named editor-in-chief on 1 January 1984. Upon taking over the magazine, she found it to be "pretentious, humourless. It wasn't too clever, it was just dull." The first contract writer she hired was movie producer Dominick Dunne, who she met at a dinner party hosted by the writer Marie Brenner. Dunne told Brown he was going to California for the trial of his daughter's murderer. Brown suggested he keep a diary as solace, and his resulting report (headlined "Justice: A Father's Account of the Trial of his Daughter's Killer") proved the launch of Dunne's long-running magazine career. Early pieces such as Dunne's cover story on accused murderer Claus von Bülow and Los Angeles arrivistes such as Candy Spelling, as well as the use of provocative covers, transformed the prospects of the magazine. Among others, Brown signed up Marie Brenner, Gail Sheehy—who wrote a series of widely read political profiles, including a cover story on Mikhail Gorbachev—Jesse Kornbluth, T.D. Allman, Stephen Schiff, Lynn Hirschberg, Peter J. Boyer, John Richardson, James Atlas, Alex Shoumatoff and Ben Brantley. The magazine became a mix of celebrity news and serious foreign and domestic reporting. Brown persuaded novelist William Styron to write about his depression under the title Darkness Visible, which subsequently became a best-selling non-fiction book. At the same time, Brown formed fruitful relationships with photographers Annie Leibovitz, Harry Benson, Herb Ritts, and Helmut Newton. Leibovitz's portrayals of Jerry Hall, Diane Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg and others came to define Vanity Fair. Its best-known cover of this period featured a naked and pregnant Demi Moore in August 1991. Three stories from June to November 1985 helped the magazine gain attention and circulation in a year when rumours were rife that it was to be folded into The New Yorker. Harry Benson's cover shoot of Ronald and Nancy Reagan dancing in the White House; Helmut Newton's portrait of accused murderer Claus von Bülow in his leathers with his mistress Andrea Reynolds with reporting by Dominick Dunne, and Brown's own cover story on Diana, Princess of Wales in November 1985 titled "The Mouse That Roared". Sales of Vanity Fair rose from 200,000 to 1.2 million. In 1988, Brown was named Magazine Editor of the Year by Advertising Age magazine. Advertising topped 1,440 pages in 1991 and circulation revenues rose. Despite this success, professor Jeffrey Pfeffer in his book Power: Why Some People Have It – And Others Don't suggested that the magazine was losing money. In a letter to the editor of the Evening Standard, Bernard Leser, president of Condé Nast USA, stated Pfeffer's claim was "absolutely false" and affirmed that Vanity Fair had indeed earned "a very healthy profit." Leo Scullin, an independent magazine consultant, called it a "successful launch of a franchise." Under Brown's editorship, Vanity Fair won four National Magazine Awards, including a 1989 award for General Excellence. In November 1990, two months after the first Gulf War started, Brown refused a picture of the blond Marla Maples for the cover and replaced it with a photograph of Cher. The reason for her last-minute decision, she quipped to The Washington Post: "In light of the Gulf crisis, we thought a brunette was more appropriate."
In 1992, Brown accepted the company's invitation to become editor of The New Yorker, the fourth editor in its 73 year history, following Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Robert Gottlieb. Brown was the first woman to hold the position. Before taking over, she immersed herself in vintage New Yorkers, reading the issues produced by founding editor Ross: "There was an irreverence, a lightness of touch as well as a literary voice that had been obscured in later years when the magazine became more celebrated and stuffy. ... Rekindling that DNA became my passion." "The New Yorker is a text-driven magazine and always will be, and certainly will be under my tenure," she said. Text, she added, was her "first love." Anxieties that Brown might change the identity of The New Yorker as a cultural institution prompted a number of resignations. George Trow, who had been with the magazine for almost three decades, accused Brown of "kissing the ass of celebrity" in his resignation letter. (To which Brown reportedly replied, "I am distraught at your defection but since you never actually write anything I should say I am notionally distraught.") The departing Jamaica Kincaid described Brown as "Stalin in high heels." Garrison Keillor quit immediately when he learned of her hire. However, Brown had the support of New Yorker stalwarts John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill, Lillian Ross, Calvin Tomkins, Janet Malcolm, Harold Brodkey and Philip Hamburger, as well as newer staffers Adam Gopnik and Nancy Franklin. During her editorship, she let 79 staffers go and engaged 50 new writers and editors, including David Remnick (whom she nominated as her successor), Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, Hendrik Hertzberg, Hilton Als, Ken Auletta, Simon Schama, Lawrence Wright, John Lahr, Pamela McCarthy, and executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Brown introduced the annual fiction issue and the holiday cartoon issue. She also collaborated with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to devote an issue to the theme Black in America. Brown broke the magazine's longstanding reluctance to treat photography seriously in 1992, when she invited Richard Avedon to be its first staff photographer. She approved controversial covers, including Edward Sorel's October 1992 image of a punk-rock passenger sprawled in the back seat of an elegant horse-drawn carriage, which may have been Brown's self-mocking riposte to fears that she would downgrade the magazine. A year later Valentine's Day publication of Art Spiegelman's cover of a Jewish man and a Black woman in an embracing kiss, a comment on the mounting racial tensions between Blacks and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, garnered controversy. Brown appointed Spiegelman's wife Françoise Mouly as the magazine's art editor. During Brown's tenure, the magazine received four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club Awards, and ten National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Newsstand sales rose 145 percent. The New Yorker's circulation increased to 807,935 for the second half of 1997, up from 658,916 during the corresponding period in 1992. Critics maintained it was hemorrhaging money, but Newhouse remained supportive, viewing the magazine under Brown as a start-up: "It was practically a new magazine. She added topicality, photography, color. She did what we would have done if we invented The New Yorker from scratch. To do all that was costly. We knew it would be." Under Brown, its economic fortunes improved every year: In 1995 losses were about $17 million, in 1996 $14 million, and in 1997 $11 million. In 1998, Brown resigned from The New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (then owned by The Walt Disney Company) to chair Talk Media. Opinions of Brown's New Yorker tenure varied. Editorial director Hendrik Hertzberg wrote: "She had to move fast. She was decisive ... went against the tradition of popular culture unfriendly to the written word. And what was she doing? She was pumping energy and life into a magazine devoted to publishing aesthetically and intellectually demanding writing. She saved The New Yorker." Writer Adam Gopnik said, "The magazine will remain smarter and braver—more open to argument, and incomparably less timid—for her presence here." Randy Cohen wrote, "I assume we can now look forward to Miramax becoming a shallow, celebrity-obsessed money loser she made The New Yorker." Writer Michael Kinsley wrote, "She is the best magazine editor alive. What more can I say?" Writer Stanley Crouch said, "The most important thing, I think, has been [Brown's] effort to bring together the intellectual material and the streets. When she was in charge, despite all the complaints from the old New Yorker crowd, one got a much stronger sense of the variousness of American society than one did under the editorship of perhaps the rightfully sainted Mr. Shawn."
