Is Vanity Fair browned off with Tina?

You would never guess that Tina Brown once edited (ie saved/reinvented, etc) Vanity Fair magazine, judging by the September issue.

First, in Michael Wolff's lengthy job application to Rupert Murdoch – well, Wolff's daughter does work for the Murdoch-owned The New York Post – he refers slightingly to Brown as merely a “biographer” for her offence in calling a Murdochised Wall Street Journal a “horror show”. No mention is made of her past association with VF. Sarcastically he describes her as “that paragon of journalistic virtue”. How Graydon must have chuckled over the proofs as he threw back a wave of dislodged hair with one of his head tosses, when a good barber could save him the trouble.

Then we have Edward Helmore’s fascinating piece on the late fashion stylist Isabella Blow who killed herself earlier this year by drinking weed killer. We are told that she joined Tatler in 1986 “during a creative high point there” – was this because Tina Brown had departed as editor in 1983? It seems odd that a Conde Nast mag would pick out one period in the history of another Conde Nast mag as particularly anything given that everything Conde Nast mags do is a high point, darling.

(Blow fans will be reassured that the tragic fashionista is happy now in the spirit world … after her death fashion lord Alexander McQueen consulted a Madame Arcati-ish medium who reported: “Isabella is with her grandmother.")

And while I have VF in front of me, I must applaud Dominick Dunne for botoxing his otherwise usually flaccid, meandering prose. On Paris Hilton he avers, in a moment of pure bitchery, after attending a party given by Hilton's grasping parents: “Half the men in America have seen Paris with a penis in her mouth.”