'Stalin in heels' with a talent for turning round ailing magazines

After the failure of much-hyped magazine Talk in 2002, Tina Brown hopes to reinvent herself online, with the launch of a new news website.

It was partly a love of America's capacity for giving people second chances that led Tina Brown to take US citizenship in 2005. "In England people just kind of subside," she tells Simon Houpt in The Globe and Mail. "In America people keep resurfacing in different guises." Now the 54-year-old former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, once described as "Stalin in heels", hopes to reinvent herself as a top online journalist, following the failure of her much-hyped Talk magazine in 2002, with the launch of The Daily Beast, a news website backed by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp.

Brown was never a woman to stay down. Expelled from various schools for her "subversive influence" she was asked to leave one for describing her headmistresses' breasts as "unidentified flying objects'' she ended up at a crammer and got into Oxford to read English aged 16, says Emma Brockes in The Guardian. After graduating, she was hired by The Sunday Times, where, aged 22, she began an affair with the editor, Sir Harold Evans, to whom she is still married. At 25, she became editor of Tatler, an ailing society magazine, and turned it around. When it was bought by Cond Nast in 1982, Cond Nast's boss Si Newhouse invited Brown to move to the US to edit Vanity Fair. Brown pumped up the title with bright young writers and shocking photography, including a naked, pregnant Demi Moore. In 1992 she went on to "nuke" The New Yorker, then full of what Brown describes as "50,000-word articles about zinc", says Vanessa Grigoriadis in The New York Times magazine. This appointment raised her and Evans now president of Random House to the "pinnacle" of Manhattan society, says James Robinson in The Observer. The couple became so well-known, not least for their parties at their home near Central Park, they became known simply as Tina and Harry.

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