DECISION MAKER TINA BROWN. Editor makes headlines as Talk wows New York/But can the celebrity title live up to the launch hype? Felix Salmon talks Talk with editor Tina Brown. No one does buzz better than Tina Brown. But even Brown was surprised by the amount of publicity that greeted the launch of her new magazine, Talk, this month. 'It's had a great reaction,' she says, sipping a can of Diet Coke through a straw. 'So much better than I could have ever hoped.' Brown is a celebrity in her own right and an experienced hand at being interviewed. She falls easily into a recitation of the Talk magazine party line. But when she talks of 'a launch that I could never have even imagined would be this great,' she's not exaggerating. Brown is no stranger to publicity. Putting a naked, pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair caused a sensation. Printing a special mid-week edition of the New Yorker when Princess Diana died caused more. And her resignation as editor of the New Yorker was the lead story not only in the New York tabloids, but even in the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times. The launch of Talk eclipsed all of that. The launch party alone made three New York Post front pages. (Andy Warhol was the only artist ever to have two front pages of the Post - one when he was shot, and one when he died. So, by that standard, Tina's bigger than Andy.) The interview with Hillary Clinton was the top topic on the political talk shows for two successive weekends. Brown had interviews in all the major newspapers, as well as TV's top-rated 20/20 news magazine. (It should be noted that the show is on Disney-owned ABC and Disney owns Miramax, which owns half of Talk.) But for all the hype, Talk is still a small start-up operation. Miramax's Harvey Weinstein is as famous for his tight-fistedness as Conde Nast's Si Newhouse is for his profligacy. Talk's 57th Street offices are poky and unbranded. Brown's own office is surprisingly small, maybe 15 feet by 10. It has one window with an uninspired view south over midtown. The Statue of Liberty, however, is just about visible in the distance. Brown has put a great deal of effort into Talk. When at the New Yorker, her propensity for tearing the entire issue up at the last minute was legendary. By all accounts, such behaviour is even more pronounced at Talk. 'The exciting thing about starting something from scratch is that you have a great deal invested,' Brown says. 'It's a very personal thing, to build a staff up, hand-pick them from all over, groom them and grow and promote them. It's very gratifying now that the magazine's out.' They say all celebrities are smaller in real life, and Brown is no exception. But it's not only in height that she's more disarming than her reputation would suggest. When she speaks, she looks directly at you, with steely grey-green eyes which defy you to doubt her. The monstrous figure of lore, striding down the New Yorker's corridors in her Manolo Blahnik stilettos, surrounded by sycophantic PRs and PAs, is hard to reconcile with the cream-suited figure at Talk. Which is not to say that Brown has lost any ambition. She clearly dreams that Talk - her baby from cover to cover - will be her most successful project yet. 'When I took over Vanity Fair,' she recalls, 'people kind of forget that the discussion at that point was not if it was going to fold, but when it was going to fold. I was the third editor in eight months.' She took the magazine's circulation from 300,000 to 1.2 million. The initial print run for the launch issue of Talk was one million; hoped-for sales were 500,000. As it was, within a week Hearst (co-owner of the magazine, with Miramax) was printing another 300,000 copies to keep up with demand. 'People didn't necessarily know they wanted something,' Brown says, 'but I think that when you produce something that is entertaining, smart, fresh and new, they will want it, and they have responded very, very positively.' She has ambitious plans for Talk's circulation: 'I think we'd like to build towards a million as quickly as we can. I think that with this kind of start, we're well positioned.'. CAMPAIGN 27/08/1999 P28 (Back) to felixsalmon.com