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Becky Sharp comes to America: Judy Bachrach shows how fallen editrix Tina Brown is the reincarnation of Thackeray''s seductive, social-climbing heroine.

Article Excerpt
MOST OF MY LIFE I've wanted to write Vanity Fair--the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray; in fact, I recall reading it in Rome (for about the twentieth time) during eleven hours of labor, until foreseen circumstances put an end to that amusement. What could I tell the hospital nuns who hovered around my bed, perplexed that I was neglecting my breathing exercises in favor of this pageturner? "But she had never been a girl," Thackeray wrote about Becky Sharp, his archetype of feminine shrewdness and social manipulation. I longed to leap out of my hospital bed and meet someone exactly like that, a person devoted exclusively to self-advancement. And, I am sorry to say, I never ever did.

Instead, I wrote about her. In the summer of 1999, Tina Brown, a crafty and implacably ambitious English woman who had come to the New World to try her luck and become the most famous magazine editor in the world, left the helm of the New Yorker to start her own publication. It had always been a bad idea to put her in charge of a literary magazine, anyway. Tina, I realized at once, possessed a number of promising Sharpesque characteristics. "I was never young," she informed people. "I was born thirty." True to her nature, the new magazine was intended to be a lot less literary than the New Yorker. It was to be called Talk, but nobody back then seemed to have the vaguest notion what kind of magazine it would turn out to be. Nobody, Tina included, ever would either, but how was I supposed to guess that at the time?

Of course anyone reflecting on the rapid rise and then the dizzying downward trajectory of the fictional Becky Sharp might have drawn certain conclusions. But back then I was easily influenced, as vulnerable as anyone to buzz--"buzz" being Tina's favorite word, one she lassoed in the service of her many incarnations. It was buzz that cantilevered Tina out of dull old Britain into the United States; buzz that brought her to the Conde Nast empire in 1984, where she took over the stewardship of the failing magazine Vanity Fair, and summoned to her famous parties all the would-be buzzers. And it was, finally, buzz that would eventually be her...

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