EDITOR'S LETTER

FAIR'S FARE

You may be wondering why it has taken me a year and a half of editing Vanity Fair to write an editor's letter.

There are several excuses. Firstly, in view of this magazine's stormy launch it seemed a good idea to wait to see if I was still around. Every writer knows the worst thing that can happen is to be taken on as the new columnist by an editor who gets canned. This byline wasn't going to take that chance.

Then there was the question of the editor's volatile working methods. It seemed quite likely that when the monthly fight for space happened the first page I'd kill would be Tina Brown's. That's something she would never be able to take with good grace.

The third excuse was that perhaps—being an Englishwoman—i needed time before fully owning up to the magazine you see before you. I didn't particularly want to appear in front of the curtain until we'd successfully drowned the bump and crash of noises off.

So, in choosing September to appear, I've waited for the moment when it's clear the Vanity Fair show will run and run.

Feel how pleasingly plump this issue is. That's because there are fifty pages of advertising. Observe how many irrefutably upscale people parade Vanity Fair on their coffee tables. That's because we have increased our circulation by 24 percent in one year. It's O.K. now to come out of the closet and admit you're a Vanity Fair reader. You're a market leader.

What's more, I know who you are and why you're reading us. Of course, I always thought I knew, but some months of suspense had to go by before the official research told us we were right. Horror stories abound of editors who thought their magazines were pitched at baby tycoons, only to find they were biggest with hairdressers' assistants. Sometimes, in this dark period, I lay awake at night thinking, Who are you out there in Orlando, Florida? It was from there I'd received a particularly bruising cancellation letter from a couple who signed themselves—symbolically, perhaps—as Mr. and Mrs. Small. They wrote to denounce the June 1984 issue, which had borne the unwisely jaunty copy line "The magazine that bends over backward." "Farewell," concluded the Smalls, "magazine that bends over backward."

So you can imagine my relief when the reader research studies rolled in last February and I learned your true identity. You are young, your median age is 33.9, a satisfactory margin of 2.1 years ahead of me. You are almost all college-educated, one in five of you owns a personal computer, nearly half of you have a net worth of at least $150,000, and 6 percent of you have a net worth of more than a million. A dual audience, more of you are female than male, and you like us best in California. In summary: educated, motivated, animated, sophisticated—everything about our research shows you to be as demographically delicious as we hoped you were.

Why are you reading us? Because although you already subscribe to a slew of other smart magazines you feel no one offers you the integrated breadth of Vanity Fair. You are the readers of Rolling Stone and Interview who are sick of being in the wrong company, readers of Town & Country, W, and House & Garden sick of being in the right company, and readers of The Paris Review who are sick of being in no company at all. With Vanity Fair you don't have to pretend that intellectual pursuits are incompatible with interest in fashion, taste, and, yes, even scandal. You rise above the marketing myth of the single-cell personality.

This month move from Jay Mclnemey's literary assessment of Paul Bowles, a latter-day Poe in exile, to Bob Colacello's racy account of a new social star who hangs out in a Bavarian schloss bigger than Buckingham Palace (her message seems to be let them eat Linzer torte); from Stephen Schiff's wary analysis of the ideology of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., and his magazine, The American Spectator, to Dominick Dunne's continuing revelations on the von Billow affair. When you throw in Marie Brenner's riveting heart-to-heart with Anjelica Huston, and Arthur Miller's workshop with Dustin Hoffman, it's clear that September Vanity Fair is a cabaret of class acts for a discriminating audience.

That's why it's good to know you're filling the house.

Editor in chief